The Fascinating Story of Omega: From a 19-Year-Old's Workshop to the Moon

July twenty-first, nineteen sixty-nine. Three hours and fifteen minutes Universal Time. Buzz Aldrin's boot finds the lunar surface nineteen minutes after Neil Armstrong's. Six hundred million people watch on Earth. On his wrist, strapped over the bulky white pressure suit with a long Velcro band, sits an Omega Speedmaster Professional, reference one zero five zero one two eference one zero five zero one two. The watch is mass-produced. Anyone with the money can walk into a Swiss authorized dealer in Zurich, or a watch shop in Houston, and buy the same one off the shelf. NASA has bet six astronauts' lives on a chronograph available to civilians at retail price. Pull the camera back. For most of human history, accurate time is a craft. Every precision instrument is hand-fitted by a master and serviceable only by its maker. A sailor without a working chronometer is a man lost at sea. A pilot in nineteen fourteen, navigating an open cockpit by dead reckoning, misses his target by miles because his cockpit watch runs slow in the cold. A surgeon timing a heartbeat trusts whatever instrument he can afford. The world runs on time it cannot fully trust. The problem is not the absence of clocks. The problem is that accurate time is scarce, customized, fragile. It exists for navies, observatories, and the wealthy. It does not exist for the ordinary person who needs a watch that works after a fall, a soak, a cold morning, a hot afternoon. The world needs precision that can be mass-produced, serviced anywhere, and trusted in conditions no watchmaker has imagined. Narrow the camera. Switzerland in the eighteen forties. The Jura mountains. A region where farmers spend winters at workbenches assembling watch parts they have cut by hand. The system is called étabissage. It is scattered, slow, brittle. Watches are a luxury, not a tool. This is the world Louis Brandt is born into on May thirteenth, eighteen twenty-five, in the Swiss village of La Chaux-de-Fonds.