The honest story of the Langdon GMT
The Langdon GMT was not planned for 2024. It was planned for 2026, at the earliest. A note on how a personal complaint at a kitchen table in 2022 produced the watch two years sooner.
The honest story of the Langdon GMT
The Langdon GMT was not on the product plan for 2024. It was pencilled in for 2026 at the earliest, behind the Chronograph and behind a quieter piece we have now shelved. That it appeared two years ahead of schedule is mostly my wife’s fault, and I mean that affectionately.
Sarah works across four time zones on an ordinary week — London, Zurich, New York, and California — and she has worn my watches for as long as I have made them. In 2022 she borrowed a GMT I had been testing, a caller-configuration piece from a well-regarded Swiss maker whose name does not matter here. She wore it for eight days. On the ninth day, at the kitchen table in Southampton, she put it down and said: “This watch is for someone who works in London and visits New York. I live in both places. It is the wrong watch.”
The distinction she was drawing is the distinction between a caller GMT and a flyer GMT, and it is the defining distinction of the complication. In a caller GMT — which is what most affordable GMTs are, including most of the ETA 2893 and Sellita SW330 implementations — the main hour hand shows your local time, and the 24-hour hand is set to a second zone that you reference when you are calling someone in New York. When you travel, you adjust the main hands, and the 24-hour hand comes with them because it is physically linked. You have to reset the second zone every time.
In a flyer GMT, the arrangement is inverted. The 24-hour hand is your home time, anchored and permanent. When you land in a new city, you pull the crown to the first position and jump the hour hand independently in one-hour increments. The seconds keep running. Home time stays home time. This is a mechanical distinction of substantial practical consequence: a caller GMT is for the person who sits still and makes calls abroad, and a flyer GMT is for the person who actually goes there.
Sarah wanted a flyer. What she was wearing was a caller. No amount of careful regulation would fix that.
I spent the following month making sketches. The initial ones were all wrong. I drew a 40mm case, then a 42mm, then a 41mm and could not decide. I drew a dial with the 24-hour scale on an internal chapter ring, which looked cluttered. I drew one with the scale printed on the fixed bezel, which looked better but forced the bezel to be too thick for the dress-sport hybrid I was after. I eventually settled on the 24-hour scale printed on the outer edge of the dial itself — what horologists call the rehaut — with a simple polished fixed bezel above it. This decision cost us three months of dial-maker negotiation, because printing on the rehaut to the tolerance we wanted required a jig none of our suppliers had.
The movement choice was simpler. The Sellita SW330-2 in its flyer configuration is the finest affordable flyer-GMT base available. I considered a full in-house development and rejected it for the only sensible reason: the SW330-2 works, it is robust, and an in-house GMT calibre from a maker our size would cost the client another six thousand pounds for no operational improvement. Independent watchmaking requires regular reminders that we are not obliged to invent what has already been invented competently.
The prototype that finally convinced me was not the first that looked right. It was the seventh. I wore it for six weeks, starting in Bienne and ending in a hotel room in Edinburgh the night before a client viewing. On the morning of the viewing I reset the hour hand — one jump, from Central European to British time — and the seconds had not stopped, and the date had not jumped incorrectly, and the piece felt, on the wrist, like the watch Sarah had described at the kitchen table two years earlier. I remember sitting on the edge of the bed for a moment longer than I needed to.
The Langdon GMT ships in two dials, a sunray midnight blue and a chocolate brown. The blue is the piece most journalists photograph. The brown is the piece most serious collectors end up buying. Both dials sit on the same calibre, the same case, and the same story.
The honest part of the honest story is this: I made the Langdon GMT because a woman at a kitchen table told me every previous GMT I owned was wrong, and she was correct, and the piece that exists now is my admission of that fact. I am grateful she said it plainly. The watch exists because she did.
Harold Finch is the watchmaker at Ashworth & Finch. He is married to Sarah, who still borrows his watches and still tells him when they are wrong.