Weems Navigator Watch

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The Weems Navigator Watch is styled after the famous Weems Second Setting Watch designed by Captain Philip Van Horn Weems in 1928 and used by famous aviators including Charles Lindbergh and the U.S. Air Force during World War II.

The complicated tables and timely calculations required for celestial navigation were effective at sea. However, the speed of airplanes presented new problems and inspired Weems' tireless pursuit to simplify navigational techniques.

The Weems System required two shots of the sun with a modified sextant, an accurate time reading from the second setting watch, and referencing of the tables in the Line of Positions book - a revolutionary method for navigation at the speed of flight.

Weems invented the Second Setting Watch - a watch that would help navigators find Greenwich Mean Time - a critical step. The final design allowed a navigator to read an accurate time directly from the watch face.

When you set a watch, you can adjust the hour and minute hands, but the second hand sweeps on irrevocably. To the layman it is not important if his watch is twenty seconds off. To the navigator, it can be a matter of life or death. So navigators, when they synchronized their watches with observatory time, used to make note of how many seconds their sweep hand was off. This factor, plus or minus, had to be figured for every calculation they made on a voyage. Weems mounted a movable rim on his watch, marked the sixty seconds on it and, since he was unable to adjust the second hand to the watch face, he simply adjusted the face to the hand.

The Line of Position Book offered the navigator extensive charts of pre-calculated positions. The air navigator could simply and quickly look up the positions, instead of doing extensive complicated calculations.

Weems modified a sextant to operate independent of the horizon to facilitate navigation in the air, where the horizon is not visible. This innovation provided the foundation for the invention, more than a decade later, of the Link Bubble sextant.

The Swiss-made watch has a rotating bezel which can be set as a visual reminder to monitor elapsed time. The dial and hands are fitted with gaseous tritium light source (GTLS), a technology formerly only found in professional dive watches.

• Accurate Swiss-made quartz movement
• Mineral glass crystal
• Gaseous Tritium Light Source (GTLS) illuminates hour markers and hour/minute/second hands
• Water resistant to a depth of 330' (10 ATM)
• Uni-directional bezel rotates to align guide marker with seconds or minute hand to monitor elapsed time
• Date window showing day of the month
• Two watch bands - Water resistant black Italian calf skin - Waterproof black rubber sport band (strap changing tool included)
• Each watch is individually numbered
• Gift-boxed and ready for presentation
• Case size: 42mm diameter (1.6 inches diameter)
• Available in black or white dial
• 2 Year Warranty