Cold War and Watch Design

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I don’t envy my father’s generation at all because even though they had some of the best music and movies to enjoy without the hassle of a cellular phone, or spam calls, or worse encore, calls for directions, or, worse encore, OTPs, they still had to live through not just national crises like civil unrest (the Emergency), wars with neighbouring states and the general aftermath of a newly independent but impoverished state, but also feel the ripples of international repercussions like the recent World War and the more silent but deadly, Cold War. If you are married then one needn’t explain why, in an alliance of two, a Cold War is the worst kind of a fight.

History #101

For others, the singles possibly, or the blasée, wondering, if there is a positive side to a cold war, well, read on. Watches, for one, improved not by leaps and bounds but by entire eras and eons in a very short span of time. It was a series of revolutions that nobody imagined or even knew how to take in all at once that fast, quite unlike the minutely obnoxious micro-evolutions that Apple keeps shlepping year after year and expects people to stay addicted to their ware.

But back to the serious (War) at hand. The Cold War, for those who skipped history classes, was a race to become the first world superpower and was largely a period of stand-off between the two nations which emerged as the most internationally dominant after WWII viz. the USA and the USSR. Given how one was capitalism based and the other preached the virtues of socialism, the rivalry became even more poignant, a clash of philosophies and not mere might. The war had ended but Europe was left divided, sliced up between nations supported by the US and those with Russia as their benefactor.

Why Watches

Unlike the preceding war which was fought in a battlefield with guns and infantry, the Cold War wasn’t so obvious. Both were nuclear nations so an outright war would have decimated both. Instead, they set about to proving their supremacy through other fields of achievement. It could have been sports, or even a dance-off, but sadly it didn’t happen. Instead, the two powers set themselves to establishing even stronger military might for a “just in case” kind of a situation. This kind of preparation would need precision, timing and coordination not just in one place but across vast stretches of land. Even the deadliest of missiles or precise of launchers still needed human intervention to operate them and for this, communication and execution would need to workhand in hand so that the impact could be maximised and effective. For this the various authorities and entities would need to work like clockwork and it wouldn’t help if all the timekeeping devices were either the size of a room or propped up against walls.

For true coordination, people would track time, be it in a field, underwater, up in the air, or in extreme weather conditions. A watch which could stand all that and still keep ticking was no more a technological flourish, it was an absolute need of the, pun intended, hour.

The Two Approaches

The US wanted standardisation and stringent levels of certification for quality control. They wanted devices that performed precisely, every time, time after time. They didn’t like breakdown. If something failed, it didn’t matter if it was cheap to produce. The USSR, on the other hand, had a slightly different and possibly more stoic outlook. They wanted devices that could endure hardships but, if they broke down, could be repaired easily. They just wanted a workhorse, even if meant sacrificing aesthetics.
For both powers, watches were a tool, an infallible device of measurement, not a wrist embellishment that we see them as today. Even though they were making their own devices, they did turn to Europe for refinement or accelerating the advancements. And this is where the watches, as we know them, to coin a verb, were “Midas-ed”. Odd as it may sound, Switzerland being a neutral party in all this didn’t really help their cause, even if it created the environment for them to make some serious breakthroughs in the world of watchmaking and timekeeping. If they had been seen as the pioneers so far, this period would baptise them in fire and cement them as a global power in this one aspect. They were the ones who had made some progress in the areas of waterproofing, night-time legibility, shock protection and anti-magnetism, and now, as each power got racing by flogging the Swiss timekeeping industry, they would start pushing each aspect to its very limits.

Key Cold War Watch Development

So apart from the few mentioned above, what did the Cold War yield as watch design that we can still see in the pieces we were today.

1. Dials were now coated with anti-glare coatings or made with materials that worked to reducing glare. This was useful in field watches as also for fighter pilots in cockpits high up in the sky.
2. Larger numerals came to define many watches, especially pilot watches, and this instrument cluster -style typography is a feature that we still find in many pieces today.
3. Hacking seconds, i.e., a possibility to stop the seconds’ hand by engaging the crown. This is extremely crucial when coordinating executions down to the last millisecond.
4. Luminous markings which further aided in telling time in low light conditions.
5. Straps in specialised materials which could serve under different conditions – from rubber underwater to canvas (NATO style) straps in the field. This evolution is also how steel came into prominence as a material for wristwatches.
6. Enhanced water resistance and the addition of helium valves, which would aide divers in their sorties.
7. Rotating bezels also came about around now, be it for timing dives, or for clocking a secondary time zone.
8. Apart from fall and shock resistance, anti-magnetism was one of the most significant additions during this era as it freed up watches from the possible influence of magnetic fields, which was a constant issue given how radars and other avionic devices were constantly creating these. This was also a key feature for scientists working in labs with electronic equipment as magnetism could drastically affect their work.
9. In fact, the birth of quartz a few years down was also an outcome of this race for precision and simplicity.
10. Many certifications that were created by the armed forces came to define the standards that premium timepieces would be held up to for a long time to come. Navy-ready or Commando-gear stamped on a watch was once a need, now it’s a point of pride.

The Outcome

All this precision being built into the system but no war on the horizon, where do you think it all spilled over then? Space, for one. What started as a supremacy tussle soon became all about who will get to space first. Space travel required unprecedented levels of precision and time measurement, like with calculating even small tasks like how much thrust and exactly when, or how long to run one program before another switches on and takes over – nothing defined clockwork like a trip to space would, and did. Russia beat the US to it, who then doubled down to become the first to reach the moon (parking all controversial/conspiracy theories in a separate sub-stack for another day).

Cold War and the Common Man Today

Apart from the space race, these timekeeping advancements trickled down to the lesser mortals, us, the civilians. And just like duffel coats and bomber jackets, these watches too would eventually come to define how we dress and present ourselves every day. It feels surreal to even think that articles and devices which were once developed out of necessity for crucial survival are today flaunted as mere fashionable style statements. So the next time you flex a diver with its unidirectional bezel or luminous hands, or talk about your chronograph’s precision down to the hundredth of a second, remember that there was once a time when all this was being clandestinely developed behind closed doors in utter secrecy and with utmost hurried fervour, all in a bid to a war which never was. If there is any lesson here, it is possibly this that one should openly communicate in a relationship, and maybe resolve to never go to bed angry.