Timeline  /  The first GMT wristwatch
1955

The first GMT wristwatch

First

In 1955 Rolex gave the GMT-Master a red hand that turns once a day against a 24-hour bezel, so Pan Am crews could read Greenwich time beside local time.

Rolex GMT-Master reference 6542 of about 1955: steel case, black dial, red 24-hour hand and a blue-and-red Bakelite bezel
A GMT-Master reference 6542 made in about 1955: the red arrow hand turns once a day and is read against the 24-hour bezel, blue for the night hours and red for the day. The bezel insert of these first watches was Bakelite with the numerals painted on its underside; it cracked easily and most were replaced by metal.Photograph: Phillips, The Geneva Watch Auction: XI, 27–28 June 2020, lot 179
The need
By the 1950s an airline crew could leave New York in the evening and land in London the next morning, with the schedules, the radio and the logbook all kept in Greenwich Mean Time. A pilot needed home time or GMT and local time on the same dial, without arithmetic.
Made by
Rolex, Geneva, for Pan American World Airways. Rolex dates the launch to 1955 and the GMT-Master became the airline’s official watch; some sources, Phillips among them, give 1954 for the first release.
What was new
A fourth hand, geared to turn once in twenty-four hours instead of twice, read against a rotating bezel marked 0 to 24. Leave the bezel at 24 on top and the hand shows the hour in 24-hour form; turn the bezel by the difference between two zones and the same hand reads the second zone. The two-tone insert, blue for 18 to 6 and red for 6 to 18, tells day from night at a glance.
Worth knowing
The 24-hour hand of the first GMT-Master cannot be set on its own: it is locked to the hour hand, so the watch shows one time with its hands and a second one only through the bezel. The hour hand that jumps independently, which is what makes a modern “true GMT”, came to Rolex in 1982 with the GMT-Master II. The idea itself is older: see GMT.
Where it is now
Early 6542s pass through the auction houses; the one pictured was sold by Phillips in Geneva in 2020. Rolex does not operate a public museum.

Historian’s noteNot the first watch to show a second zone. Glycine’s Airman of 1953 had a 24-hour dial and a rotating 24-hour bezel two years earlier, and Louis Cottier’s world time watches of the 1930s showed every zone at once. The GMT-Master is the first to put a separate 24-hour hand on an ordinary 12-hour dial, which is the layout every GMT watch since has copied.

SourcesRolex, history 1953–1967 · Rolex, time zone to time zone · Phillips, lot 179 (2020)

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