Why We Love It

We’ve carried 242Ts before, but never before have we offered one like this.

What we have here is a 242T-7004B World-Time Chronograph. Yes, you read that right. Not only will it tell you the time at your destination, it will also tell you the time at home and how long it will take you to get there.

This is probably the first chronograph that we’ve seen that couples a 24-hour indication with a world time indicator, here represented by several cities on a rotating black bezel. The presence of old, forgotten names like Bombay and Calcutta speak to the watch’s birth in the swinging 60s. But strapping on this watch will take us back—and anywhere else we want to go.

The Story

As watches go, the 242T has story and lineage and charm. It deserves to rank among the Rolex Daytona and Omega Speedmaster as one of the great sporting chronographs of the 1960s. Like those watches, the 242T was designed to be a sportsman’s companion—on any day, in any sport, at any time.

Also, like the Speedmaster, the 242T was most likely submitted to NASA for the Qualification Test Procedures. Several of the great watch manufactures—Omega, Bulova, Wittnauer, Rolex, to name a few—submitted watches for consideration in the Apollo space program. They were subjected to rigorous trials that pushed the watches to the very limit of their endurance.

Of course, the Speedmaster eventually won out, but Wittnauer touted its participation in the trials in advertising campaigns, securing it a place on collectors’ must-have lists.