IWC Aquatimer IW376903

From keeping pilots on time as they crossed from one longitude to another, to accompanying astronauts into space, watchmaking has played an integral part in much of mankind's advancement during the 20th century. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention, and watchmaking had to constantly evolve to meet the needs of the wearer, where accurate timekeeping was crucial to success—and in some cases, survival.

Many examples of the intersection between engineering and beauty exist in this world. Concorde is one, the Shard another and IWC's original Portuguese is a third. What these three things have in common is the ability to make a practical solution into something desirable: concorde had its pencil-thin white fuselage draped in aggressively swept wings; the Shard has a domineering presence on the London skyline that slices through the low cloud; and the Portuguese has a stark and simplistic elegance bereft of any cumbersome design appendages. The Portuguese was made to be a watch—a big watch—and the purity of its inception gives it an honest, appealing quality.

Thanks to the Romans, Pope Gregory XIII, Jesus and of course the orbit of our home, Earth, we have a calendar system that is as concise and efficient as the English language itself. I can imagine that early watchmakers loathed the fripperies of our months, years and leap years when devising methods of recording and displaying the path of our journey through space, but thankfully they persisted in their endeavours, giving us today what we call the perpetual calendar. And despite the complexity of microchips and atomic clocks, we can still enjoy the hard work of previous generations in devising what just might be the most impressive complication ever to sit inside a watch.

As a sucker for vintage watches but with a wrist wide enough to make them look silly, I'm always open to heritage-inspired designs upscaled to modern proportions. When I saw the press release for the Vulcain 50s Presidents' Chronograph Heritage (herein known as Presidents' Chrono - take note you people at Vulcain in charge of naming watches) I was immediately drawn to it. If I'm a sucker for vintage watches, I'm even more so for bi-compax chronographs, and with the printed tachymeter on the dial and the single rectangular pusher, I was smitten.