When you look closely at a map of the world's time zones, the inconsistencies are enough to make you wish you lived smack on the Greenwich meridian. There's China, sprawling across five zones yet stubbornly insisting that the time in Beijing must be the same as the time in Chengdu, almost 1,000 miles to the west. Then you have India, within walking distance of Pakistan yet half an hour ahead of its distrusted neighbor. Spin the globe and you find the Azores, off the coast of Mauritania. Based on their longitude, these verdant isles should have their clocks in sync with barren South Georgia thousands of miles below, but their zone has been redrawn around them, as if they were shunning a less glamorous peer. In fact, South Georgia has a zone largely to itself, which is why this inhospitable, rocky place whose main industry is ocean fishing has come to find its name on a $23,500 Swiss watch.
The timepiece in question is Girard-Perregaux's elegant ww.tc-Financial ("World Wide Time Control"), which features a unique, ingenious way of allowing its wearer to tell the time anywhere in the world at a glance, instead of having to scroll through multiple screens on a PDA. The watch's outer dial exhibits the names of 24 places, each representing a different time zone. The adjacent hour ring corresponds with local time in the cities that encircle it, meaning that you can miraculously see the time in Denver and Dubai in the same instant. It's an attractive, unfussy way to display a large amount of information, but what's even more impressive is that it also shows you when the world's major stock markets open and close. Each exchange is indicated by a line (London and Tokyo are blue, New York and Hong Kong are red) which runs around the location ring. When the red arrow points to one or more of these lines, the markets in question are open. So by quickly looking at your wrist, you can tell if London and New York are both going full throttle or whether Tokyo has just stepped out for lunch, allowing you to concentrate on Hong Kong for a while before its traders take their own envy-inducing two-hour breather.
Like many of the best ideas, the watch's worldwide-time aspect is primarily a feat of imagination rather than engineering, but the ww.tc also has several technical features to tout. GP is one of the few watchmakers to design and build its own movements, and the watch's inner workings (which are finished with an eye-catching engraved design) are proudly displayed on the back. The sapphire crystal panel itself is held in place by six gold screws that have been polished to match the underside of the case. Lugs are tapered, so the watch curves around the wrist rather than sitting up awkwardly like a tabletop. Fit is made snugger still by a hinged clasp in addition to a traditional buckle on the hand-stitched crocodile strap.
