Breitling Colt Auto Montres

Since the whopping $17.8 million sale of Paul Newman’s Paul Newman, the world’s—or what seems like it—attention has been turned to vintage chronographs. Thing is, vintage chronographs can be pretty expensive. There are some great options out there if you’re willing to do a lot—a lot—of research, but even those can be costly. A Longines 13ZN can fetch as much as £15,000 for example. If all that sounds too much like hard work, then perhaps we have the answer for you…

In a time of calculators, computers, smart phones and the internet, the answer to any question is never more than a few taps of a screen or clicks of a button away. Remember when you had to just know who was in a movie, or what that song was? Before then, before all of that, there was a time when complex calculations were only achievable by hand or with a slide rule. It’s a skill that’s been lost over generations, but today we’re going to find out how, exactly, this mess of lines and numbers actually works.

Even if you've only been interested in watches a short while, you'll likely already know that mechanical is king. It's traditional, exceptional, nostalgic; a far cry from the cold, industrial efficiency of quartz. Quartz nearly destroyed traditional watchmaking after all, and is the bastion of the cheap, plastic digital watch that took over the industry in the 1970s.

Breitling's Colt enters 2017 with a variant that seems more adventurer-focused than ever. For a time-only watch it is feature-packed with modern tech geared at making the watch stronger, lighter and more accurate. The headlining detail is the use of Breitlight, appearing for the second time since the release of the 2016 Avenger Hurricane.