Ah, the weird microbe of horology! There’s something delightfully strange about collecting watches, especially when you go beyond the usual, predictable shiny suspects. My collection is not your typical lineup of diamond clad, sparkling Rolex’s or pretentious Patek Philippe’s. Oh no, my watches are much weirder (and cheaper! 😄), each one more eccentric than the last. How does a watch end up on my wrist? Well, it’s gotta be big (don’t ask me why); techy (obviously, it’s me); and most importantly: it needs to tell a story. My watches are conversation starters, wrist-worn tales of adventure, oddity, and a healthy little bit of madness.
I’m no bleating sheep; my watches stand out, a traveling circus of timekeeping oddities, where each piece juggles its own wild story:
Breitling: a brand for pilots, astronauts, adventurers (and me)
Since I was a little boy, Breitling has always held a special place in my heart. Here is a brand that crafts wrist-worn tools for adventurers, from crazy daredevil pilots to brave astronauts and balloon lunatics.
Breitling Chronospace Military: stealth black perfection
This one is pure stealth. Wearing it feels like strapping on the mission plans of a secret agent. Fifty millimeters of black carbon-coated steel radiating quiet menace. The sapphire crystal cuts glare like it means it. The SuperQuartz inside ticks ten times sharper than ordinary quartz, because of course it does. Built for the extreme and some… But mostly used to time how long I can postpone replying to emails.
And yet, make no mistake. With this thing on, I feel like a Navy SEAL on standby. One day, maybe I’ll sneak into a high-security compound wearing it. For now, sneaking out of a Teams meeting will do.
Breitling Chronomat UTC: blue, of course
The Breitling Chronomat UTC is my blue beauty. A tribute to those jet-setting pilots who stroll into Casablanca bars, nodding at Russian spies in suspiciously slit dresses. There’s something unapologetically cinematic about it. You can almost hear the soundtrack the moment it clicks onto your wrist.
The UTC module lets me track another time zone, which makes me look far busier and more international than I probably am. It’s the watch equivalent of a second passport and a suspicious smile at customs. Sleek design, perfect proportions, that signature Breitling blue, impossible to resist.
When I wear it, I’m not just crossing a thousand little tasks off endless lists. I’m time-traveling between continents, between past meetings and future plans, between what’s next and what should have been left behind. And yes, checking this dial still feels infinitely cooler than pulling out a phone and pretending to look important.
The Breitling Emergency: a watch with superpowers
Meet the Breitling Emergency, a muscled superhero of the collection. A proper tool watch. Heavy, trustworthy, a beacon of hope. It carries a built-in Dassault emergency transmitter that can broadcast a distress signal to rescue teams. If I ever get lost in the wilderness, or more realistically in the backyard, this thing could save my life. A small miracle of engineering disguised as jewellery for people who prefer cliffs to conference rooms. If it’s good enough for globe-circling balloon adventurers, it’s good enough for me.
In the unlikely event I lose a fight against a grizzly in the Appalachians, at least my body will be found before the hyenas start negotiations. So far, the most adventurous places I’ve worn it are the beach and the muddy woods around home in my Defender. Still, there’s comfort in knowing that whether I’m crossing the Alps or the frozen-foods aisle, I’ve got both James Bond and Bear Grylls whispering from my wrist.
U-BOAT 1001: deep-diving madness
The U-BOAT 1001 looks like something built for people who stopped trusting oxygen. A massive lump of metal designed to survive 1 001 meters under the surface, a depth where only submarines, giant squids and bad ideas belong. I have no business down there. I don’t even like the deep end of the pool. Still, this thing has a presence. You don’t wear it; you negotiate with it. The case is huge, the crown sticks out like industrial plumbing, and the dial stares back as if daring you to do something stupid. It’s beautifully absurd.
I have never wrestled a kraken, but with this watch, the calamari at the local seafood joint never stood a chance. It could probably handle the Mariana Trench, yet it mostly sees coffee foam and city rain. Overkill has rarely felt this good.
The Bulova Computron: straight outta sci-fi
The Bulova Computron looks like it fell off the wrist of a 1970s movie robot and somehow kept ticking. Sharp angles, red LED display, dinosaurical digital. It doesn’t try to imitate anything mechanical or elegant; it just hums with retro confidence, like it knows it once belonged to the future (a long, long time ago)
Telling the time on it feels more like launching something. You press a button, the red digits flare up, and for a split second you expect a door to open or a countdown to start. It’s not practical. It’s ugly. It’s theatre. And it makes every glance at your wrist feel like a secret handshake with the past.
I sometimes catch myself checking it and waiting for Scotty to beam me out of a meeting. The future never really arrived the way we imagined, but the Computron makes me believe it almost did.
CIGA Design Eye of Horus: a Piece of mechanical art
The CIGA Design Eye of Horus is a sculpture that happens to tell time. I backed it with some money very early on, mostly out of curiosity. It turned into one of those rare pieces that silence a room. Carbon fibre body, skeleton build, the movement visible like an exposed nerve. You don’t wear it, you orbit around it.
Every part of it feels alive. The balance wheel swings like a heartbeat, the light dances through the open X frame. People stop mid-sentence when they notice it. It’s not the kind of watch you check discreetly; it’s the kind that checks you back.
Mine carries my personal logo, so yes, technically it’s unique. Maybe that’s vanity. Or maybe it’s the small satisfaction of knowing that this little machine, whirring quietly on my wrist, will keep doing its thing long after I stop pretending to understand how it works.
The Russian Sturmanskie: first watch in space
The Russian Sturmanskie is a small piece of history that still smells faintly of rocket fuel and cold metal. This was the watch strapped to Yuri Gagarin’s wrist when he left Earth in 1961. No sapphire crystal. No marketing department. No luxury. Just Soviet engineering, built to tick in places no human had ever been.When I wear it, I can almost hear the static of the radio transmission, the calm voice of a man orbiting the planet for the first time. Simple. Precise. Unpretentious. It carries the weight of a world holding its breath.
There is a strange beauty in that kind of confidence. No ambassadors, no hashtags, no quartz. Only gears, oil, and a dream aimed at the stars. Every scratch on its case feels like a whisper from another century.
The Omega X-33: the holy grail of space watches
The Omega X-33 sits quietly in my collection, pretending to be a watch. It’s really a piece of history that somehow escaped the lab. The model was born in the 1990s, during NASA’s X-33 program, a time when reusable spacecraft were the next big promise. Omega decided to build a watch that could handle the ride.
To design it, they took it out of the boardroom, to pilots and astronauts, men who lived by the second. General Tom Stafford from Apollo 10 was one of them. He had seen orbit from the inside and knew exactly what a space-bound watch needed to survive. Before the public even heard the name, prototypes were already up on the Russian MIR station, floating in zero gravity, ticking quietly while the Earth moved below.
Every detail is there for a reason. The titanium case keeps the weight down and the strength up. The sapphire crystal stays clear when the cockpit lights flare. The hybrid dial carries both analog hands and digital data so that one system can fail without killing the other. Mission Elapsed Time and Phase Elapsed Time let astronauts follow every stage of a mission. Three alarms reach eighty decibels, loud enough to wake anyone in orbit or remind me that the pasta water has boiled dry. There’s a perpetual calendar, a solar compass, and timekeeping for three different zones. I keep mine on Brussels, Houston, and whatever planet the week feels like.
The X-33 project that inspired it died in 2001, swallowed by cost and bureaucracy. The watch survived. Omega renamed it “Starwalker” for marketing reasons, but collectors never really followed. For those who care, it remains the Marswatch, a technical experiment that slipped into the hands of civilians. Certified for space. Tested where gravity becomes a suggestion.
It feels alive in a very mechanical way. The alarms cut through rooms. The digital display glows like old instrument panels. It has the cold, focused presence of something designed to work in silence and pressure.
I traded an old Yema and a slightly eccentric RSW to get it. No second thoughts. Some machines carry a memory of the people who built them. When I check the time, I like to think of the engineers who tested it in vacuum chambers, of Stafford running flight simulations, of all the moments when someone trusted this little device in the middle of the void.
The Omega X-33 doesn’t really keep time. It keeps faith in human precision, in that ridiculous urge to leave the ground and make something that works where almost nothing else does.
The Omega X-33 was supposed to be the end of the road. The holy grail. The watch that closed the loop between science fiction and engineering. I said the same thing about the U-Boat, the Emergency, the Chronospace. Every collector does. Then one day you see something strange, something you don’t need, and you start to imagine how it might sound on your wrist. That’s how it begins again.
I don’t collect watches to keep time. I collect them to remember what time felt like when I found them. They are stories I can touch, little fragments of obsession and noise that remind me to stay curious, to stay slightly off-centre, to keep looking for the next ridiculous thing that will make me laugh out loud in a watch shop somewhere on the edge of reason.
So what comes next? Maybe another dive into space-age engineering. Maybe a handmade mechanical oddity that makes no sense at all. Maybe something Tara will one day call “Dad’s ticking nonsense.”
Whatever it is, it will have a story. And that will be enough.
