The Breitling Navitimer Put a Flight Computer Around the Dial

On May 24, 1962, Scott Carpenter rode Aurora 7 into orbit on the fourth crewed flight of Project Mercury. On his wrist was a Breitling with a 24-hour dial, built because he had asked for one the year before. In space there was no day and night to tell a.m. from p.m., and Carpenter wanted a watch that could not be misread.

That watch was a variant of the Navitimer, a chronograph Breitling had designed for pilots who still worked out speed, fuel and distance by hand. Its crowded dial looks like an instrument panel because, for a while, it was one.

A slide rule on the wrist

Breitling was founded in Saint-Imier, in the Swiss Jura, by Léon Breitling in 1884. After Léon died in 1914 the company passed to his son Gaston, and in 1935 to his grandson Willy. Under Willy the brand made its name with a simple idea. If a pilot already carried a circular slide rule for navigation, why not put one on the watch?

The first answer was the Chronomat. Wikipedia says Breitling patented a circular slide-rule chronograph in 1941 and released the Chronomat in 1942. Phillips, the auction house, says Breitling first put a slide rule on a chronograph dial in 1940. Either way, the principle was in place more than a decade before the Navitimer existed.

A circular slide rule works with two logarithmic scales, one on the dial and one on the rotating bezel. Line up two numbers and the scales do the multiplication or division for you. According to Wikipedia's Navitimer entry, the bezel handles tachymeter, telemeter and pulsometer readings as well as general arithmetic. For a pilot, that meant ground speed, fuel burn and time to destination without reaching for a separate computer.

Built for the AOPA

The Navitimer was made for a specific customer, the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, the American club for private flyers. Breitling dates the design to 1952. Phillips says the first generation was effectively released in 1954, and the early watches carried the AOPA logo on the dial. Phillips also notes that these first AOPA watches, made from late 1954 to 1955, had no reference numbers at all.

Phillips says these first watches, which collectors call the pre-806, ran on the hand-wound Valjoux 72. The Venus 178 came next. Phillips's history dates the reference 806 and its Venus 178 to 1956, while a Phillips catalogue note on a later 806 says the Venus had been in Navitimers since 1955. Either way, the Venus 178 stayed in use until the early 1970s.

The bezel tells you the age. Phillips counts about 125 beads around the edge of the early AOPA bezel and 93 on the reverse panda version, with a milled edge replacing the beads in 1964. Collectors use those details the way the Rolex GMT-Master crowd uses bezel inserts, to sort the original from the later and the right from the swapped.

Into orbit with Scott Carpenter

Carpenter's request came in 1961, and Breitling answered with the Cosmonaute, reference 809. Phillips says it was produced in 1962 with a 24-hour dial and an enlarged beaded bezel that could be turned with gloves on. Wikipedia notes that Breitling later sold a commercial version with both the Breitling and AOPA logos.

It was not the only chronograph in the Mercury program. Five months later, on Sigma 7, Wally Schirra wore the privately bought Omega that began the Speedmaster Moonwatch story. But Carpenter's Navitimer flew first, and it gave Breitling a space credential of its own.

The watch found other wrists on the ground. Wikipedia lists Miles Davis and Jerry Seinfeld among its well-known wearers.

Automatic, then nearly lost

In 1969 Breitling joined Heuer, Hamilton and the movement specialist Dubois-Depraz to build one of the first automatic chronograph movements. Wikipedia calls the effort Project 99. It is the same Calibre 11 that powered the square case in our Heuer Monaco history. Phillips lists two Navitimers from 1969, the automatic reference 1806 and the hand-wound reference 816, and notes that some later automatic models came in a broad 48mm case collectors call the Pizza.

The quartz decade was hard on Breitling. Wikipedia says that in 1979, facing financial trouble, the company licensed the Navitimer design to the German maker Sinn, which still makes the Sinn 903 to that design but cannot use the Navitimer name. The same year Ernest Schneider bought the Breitling name from the founding family. Under Schneider the Navitimer came back to the center of the brand. Wikipedia records that in 2009 Breitling developed the B01, its own self-winding column wheel chronograph movement.

Ownership changed again in April 2017, when Théodore Schneider sold an 80 percent stake to CVC Capital Partners for $870 million. The remaining 20 percent followed in November 2018. Breitling is headquartered in Grenchen today, with production in La Chaux-de-Fonds.

The Navitimer at a glance

Here is the early line as Phillips and Wikipedia describe it. Where they disagree, both dates are shown.

By our count, the Venus 178 era ran close to two decades, from 1955 or 1956 to the early 1970s. The beaded AOPA bezel, by contrast, lasted about ten years.

Wearing one now

A Navitimer is a busy watch. The dial carries three subdials, a tachymeter and the slide rule scales, and it is meant to be read rather than glanced at. That is the appeal. Very few people will ever work out a fuel calculation on the bezel, but everything on it was put there to be used.

If you are shopping for a vintage 806, check the bezel count and the movement before anything else, and read our guide on how to buy your first mechanical watch. For more, see watch history, heritage brands and the Quiet Menace watches section. Phillips on the early Navitimers goes deeper on references and dials.

Most of the tools pilots carried in 1954 now live in a tablet. The Navitimer still carries one of them around its edge, and it still works without a battery.