Rotary
Created Friday 18 October 2024
Rotary Henley GMT
Movement: Quartz
Band: Bracelet
Glass: Sapphire Crystal
WR: 100 m
Case Colour: Stainless Steel
Case Diameter: 41.5 mm
Case Height: 10.6 mm
Feature: GMT
Dial: Black
Model: GB05108/63
strapsize: 20mm
Movement: Ronda 515.24 movement
Battery: 371 (SR920)
Rotary Watches Ltd was established at La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland by Moise Dreyfuss in 1895. By the 1920s family members Georges and Sylvain Dreyfuss began exporting Rotary watches to Britain, which was to become the company's most successful market. Rotary later became the official watch supplier for the British Army. The well known “winged wheel” Rotary logo was introduced in 1925 and has since then undergone minor changes in appearance. Rotary became an international company selling watches in more than 35 countries. Since 2014, it has been owned by Citychamp Watch & Jewellery Group Limited (an investment holding company known as China Haidian Holdings until 2014)
GMT Watch
For centuries, as the known world expanded, governments and scientific bodies were attempting to unite around a base global time. Up until recent human history, time zones were different around the world, and even within the same country, you couldn’t count on a consistent time from town to town.
With the scientifically prominent Royal Observatory set inside Greenwich, a park in London, England, it became common to use that specific location as the prime meridian for time measurements. In 1884, GMT was officially adopted as the international time standard. At that time, the International Meridian Conference established 24 time zones around GMT.
Like so many historical artifacts of science, GMT is Western-centric, but it nonetheless was adopted globally. In modern times, with the greater accuracy that atomic clocks allow, GMT has been replaced by Universal Time Coordinated (UTC; also known as atomic time). However, the prime meridian that was established through Greenwich for GMT remains the base of UTC, so GMT is still a reliable timescale.
Rolex
The launch of the GMT-Master in 1955 came at a point when people were beginning to move around the world faster and distances were becoming shorter. On land, at sea and in the skies, the relationship between time and travel was fundamentally shifting. Long-haul flights allowed voyagers to cross from one continent to another without a stopover. The GMT-Master accompanied the major transformations of its era.
Adopted by the flight crews of Pan American World Airways, better known as Pan Am, the GMT-Master came to epitomize the aeronautical watch and has since triumphed in other realms, on the wrists of world travellers.
Some GMT watches (such as the Rotary Henley GMT above) come with a rotating bezel that can be used to track a third time zone. To use the bezel, simply rotate it until the desired time zone aligns with the GMT hand.
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