The Rolex GMT-Master Claim to Fame Posted by Clyde Roper

The Rolex GMT-Master Claim to Fame

I thought it might be fun to go through some of the popular Rolex models and explain a little about their different features and also throw in a little history about the specific models?hence the title of this new series, Claim to Fame. Sometimes I forget that everybody doesn?t live and breathe these watches and their history. A brief thumbnail ?sniff of the cork? might be just the ticket to tell our readers what they really want to know about a watch, without boring them to tears with all the really esoteric watch geek minutiae!
First up is a watch that just captivates me and a lot of other watch lovers: the Rolex GMT-Master. It was originally developed for Pan Am Airlines in the 1950s to help pilots adapt to the new Space Age phenomenon of jet lag. The GMT ingeniously employed a separate 24 hour hand with a small triangle pointer that corresponded with a rotating bezel numbered 1-24. This was how the second time zone was registered. By rotating the bezel you could synchronize it with the triangle-tipped 24 hour hand to give you the time in the second time zone, while using the regular hour and minute hands and twelve hour dot markers to record your normal or ?home? time. To assist them in navigating, pilots referred to the time in Greenwich, England?Greenwich Mean Time?in the days before GPS and satellite navigation, hence the name GMT-Master.
More modern GMTs are called the GMT-Master II models and although they look about the same as the older classic GMTs, they are more sophisticated. Basically, they allow the triangle-tipped hand to move independently of the regular hour hand, and to be set separately. This actually allows the user to track three different time zones with the more modern GMT-Master IIs. This was possible because home time and ?where you are now time? could be tracked on the face of the watch with the dot makers, leaving the bezel free for tracking a third time zone. Pretty neat, huh?
Okay, so that is the thumbnail on the way the watch works. Other neat GMT factoids:
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