Within the watch world, it seems there are folks who are perfectly content with a three-hander; others prefer the added functionality that comes with the addition of hands to the dial. Today’s watch, from Arnold and Son (our first dive into their catalog is here), is definitely for that second camp.As you can see here with the Hornet World Timer, the addition of hands has also added a good bit of complexity to the dial. Given all that it has, this is what the watch can tell you:
- Hours and minutes
- Equation of time
- Multiple time zone display
- Mean solar time
- Big date display at 5 o’clock
- Month indicator
This is all powered by an in-house movement, the A1766. Rather than trying to reword what the various hands indicate, I’m going to give you the text right from the A&S site:
- Hour triangle red-tipped hands
- Long minute hand
- Short hand indicating the months moving over a graduated scale inside the circle of hour-markers
- Second time zone shown by a long triangle-tipped hand with white superluminova completing a full turn of the dial in 24 hours
- Third time zone shown by long sun-tipped hand with red superluminova, can be set to show time zones in half-and quarter-hours, a useful aid in parts of the world like India and the Pacific. It also slides, permitting it to be set to display the mean solar time of any location according to its longitude.
- Small hand indicating the equation of time: effectively, the difference between apparent solar and mean solar time, on a display segment positioned under the axis of the hands.
Hopefully that makes it a bit clearer; all of the various hands are controlled by the crowns to either side of the case. For me, it still seems like a very complicated watch. On one hand, it would be a cool piece to have in a collection, in terms of the number of things a single mechanical movement can do. On the other hand, though, it seems a bit overly cluttered for ease of use in daily wear. Of course, at an asking price just short of $10k, it may not be up for daily wear duties!
