I recently fell down the mechanical watch rabbit hole, and in doing so inadvertently discovered that maps and watches have a long history with each other. It’s a relationship that started long before smart watches brought detailed maps and turn-by-turn directions to our wrists. In this post I’ll explore some of the ways that mechanical, quartz and digital watches have incorporated maps into their interfaces, or turned themselves into mapping and navigation tools, without ever connecting to a GPS satellite or loading Google Maps. It’s old school, but the way a paper map is old school, which is to say: objectively capable of doing fewer things, but still not nothing, and in some cases quite impressive given the tech involved.
What follows is a roundup of the kinds of watches that have something to do something with maps. I’ll proceed very, very roughly from least to most expensive—the cheapest watches running somewhere around $30, the most expensive rather eye-wateringly more than that—with a couple of representative examples from each category. This won’t be comprehensive or exhaustive; obsessive watch nerds will no doubt be able to come up with a lot more examples.
Digital Watches and Time Zones
The least expensive watches under consideration here are digital watches that use a map of the world to indicate the current time zone. These are watches designed for travellers who need to switch from one time zone to another; the map reminds them of which time zone the watch is currently set to. This is a handy feature when you have a watch that can’t update the time from the local cellular network. The best known of these is the Casio AE-1200 (
Alternatives include Casio’s own LF-30W series, a resin watch that’s smaller, less rugged, and has less battery life ($40, ); Timex’s World Time Digital series, which is eerily similar to the AE-1200 ($83-115, ); and Lorus’ R2351PX9, R2353PX9 and R2355PX9 models.
Compasses, Altimeters and Other Tools
Watches in this category blur the lines between watch, smartwatch and fitness tracker, with sensors designed to support outdoor activity. Not all of those sensors have something to do with navigation, but you often find a compass or an altimeter in the package. Mechanical watch movements don’t like magnets, so it’s no surprise that watches with built-in compasses use quartz. The Timex Expedition Tide-Temp Compass ($259-339, ) is an analog quartz watch that includes a tide clock, a thermometer and a compass; the Citizen Promaster Altichron ($625-1,025, ), a very large (47mm diameter) solar quartz watch, has both an altimeter and a compass, which use a sub-dial and two extra hands on the main dial to show altitude and direction, making for a pretty busy and complicated watch face. Nor are these frictionless features: both watches come full of caveats and calibration requirements.
At the other extreme, you have the big, rugged G-Shock Master of G series, some of which include barometric altimeters and compasses alongside other features like Bluetooth and GPS ($435-1,400, ), but these sorts of watches are where you start bumping up against fitness tracker and smartwatch territory, both in terms of functionality and price.
(Side note: Some watches have built-in GPS, but that’s for automatically setting the time, not navigation.)
But you don’t need a built-in compass to use a watch as a compass. Any analog watch can be used as a compass, in a pinch. Find the sun in the sky. In the northern hemisphere, align the hour hand with the sun; true south is at the mid point between the hour hand and 12 o’clock. The method differs in the southern hemisphere, you have to adjust for summer time, and it’s not super precise: again, it’s meant to do in a pinch. There are tutorials online that explain how to do it: here’s one, here’s another, here’s a third. And there are plenty of tutorials on YouTube; here’s an example:
There are watches that take this one step further by adding a compass bezel, which can make it easier to orient yourself to all the directions once you’ve used the watch to figure out what south is: you rotate the bezel to the right position. Compass bezels are surprisingly common in the relatively affordable watch space. They come in two variants: external bezels around the outside of the watch dial, similar to dive timer and GMT bezels; and internal bezels, where the directions are kept under the watch’s crystal and the bezel is turned by a second crown.
The best known compass watch is the Seiko Alpinist ($725-995), which uses an internal bezel, comes in several colours and includes a GMT variant. Seiko has also released a less expensive series of external-bezel compass watches as part of the Seiko 5 line: the HDB006, HDB007, HDB008 and HDB009 are scheduled for release this month ($385-400). On the Swiss-made side of things, Hamilton’s Khaki Expedition Auto watches add an external bezel to their line of field watches (CHF 925-1,050). These are all self-winding mechanical watches. On the quartz side of things, Casio’s MTD-130D, which uses an internal bezel, is inexpensive and apparently discontinued; Watch Country had a review of it last year.
Paying a premium for a compass bezel is basically a flex. Being able to figure out directions from an analog watch is a neat trick; needing it in practice requires you to be in unfamiliar territory with an analog watch, but without a $10 magnetic compass (some of which attach to your watch strap!), or a compass app on your phone (one comes standard on an iPhone). Which is to say that it’s not a situation that is likely to come up much.2
By far the oddest navigation tool to be attached to a watch has to be the opisometer bolted onto the side of the Seiko Map Meter SLT109P1. What the hell is an opisometer? It’s a wheel that measures distances on a map: the Seiko’s is for 1:50,000 maps. What the hell is it doing on the side of a watch? Beats me. The Map Meter seems to be a multitool in watch form: it’s GMT watch with a compass bezel, a perpetual calendar and dive-watch grade water resistance; the opisometer is practically lagniappe. As Martin Lorton points out in the above video, it’s not really useful any more. You’d have to be a pretty old-school map user to have any opisometer in your kit, watch-based or not (I remember playing with one as a kid). But look at how it works! I want this watch more than I ought to. There are a few available on eBay (mostly, it seems, from Indonesia) in the $300-325 range.
Believe it or not, this is not the weirdest watch on deck today.
Maps as Design Elements
Some watches don’t add any particular map function, but use maps as part of their design. Sometimes it’s just an ordinary watch with a map printed on the dial, no big deal. Sometimes the design evokes map elements. Here are examples from two microbrands. The Erebus Twenty-Four has a “Contour” variant where contour lines on a grid are printed on the dial ($599). The Kollokium Projekt 02 goes further, stacking 67 plates to create a third dimension and actual depth to the dial (CHF 3,333-3,666, sold out).
And sometimes things get weird. Which brings me to the Blue Planet from CIGA design. It doesn’t just incorporate a map into the dial, it incorporates a map into the timekeeping. It’s a big watch—43mm or 46mm across, 17mm thick—with a partial view of the globe taking up the bulk of the dial (two variants centre on southeast Asia and the north Atlantic). Hour and minute rings surround the globe: the hours are fixed, the minute band and globe rotate, and the compass bezel on the globe points to the time (example). At $1,200-1,400 this is … for what it is, almost affordable? Certainly less expensive than it would have been if it were Swiss rather than Chinese.
Expensive is what comes next. Brace yourself.
World Timers
The most expensive map watches are world timers: these are analog watches that track multiple time zones with a 24-hour ring around the dial (as opposed to a GMT watch, which uses an additional hour hand: the difference between the two watch types is explained here). Not every world timer has a map on the dial, but a lot of them do.
On some world timers, like the Haim Viajero ($1,115; see Worn & Wound review), Frédérique Constant Worldtimer (CHF 4,995-7,995), Breguet Hora Mundi ($ouch), and Patek Philippe world time watches ($yikes), the map is just a signifier: it’s usually a regional or rectilinear world map with no reference value.
(An outlier is the Zelos Spearfish Dual Time ($2,200), which puts a second watch dial, with a map in the background, in the small seconds position.)
But others use a polar projection that matches the time zones on the 24-hour ring. The least expensive and most accessible of these are the Citizen Promaster Geo Trekker series ($825-875), which puts the polar projection and world time indicator in a small dial at the six o’clock position, and the more conventional Farer World Timer series ($1,775-1,850; see Two Broke Watch Snobs review). After that it gets awful. Omega’s Aqua Terra Seamaster line has a series of world timers in several colours and in cases ranging from steel to gold (CHF 9,200-47,900). The Jaeger-LeCoultre Geophysic Universal Time, announced in 2014 and discontinued a few years later, was also in the same ballpark, price-wise; see the Fratello review.
At the stupid-crazy high end we get watches like the Ulysse Nardin Tellurium Johannes Kepler , a platinum watch, limited to 100 pieces, that in addition to a world timer ring includes an astrolabe (CHF 159,800—about $200K); and the Jaeger-LeCoultre Grande Tradition Calibre 948, which incorporates a flying tourbillon that circles the dial once a day, rose gold, limited to 20 pieces, price: “inquire” (which is to say, almost certainly the most expensive watch mentioned here, possibly by an order of magnitude).
This is, as I said, not a comprehensive list. I haven’t gone down the watch rabbit hole deep enough for this to be thorough or authoritative. But this should give you some idea of the kinds of old-school watches that do map-related things, along with some idea of what kind of hurt you’d be inflicting on your bank balance if you started making grabby hands in these watches’ direction.