Top: The Piaget Polo, featured in the new book Time Machines: How Watches Shaped the Modern World, has one of the thinnest automatic movements in the world. (Photos courtesy of Gestalten)
What makes Time Machines: How Watches Shaped the Modern World a must-read for any watch lover isn’t just its 300+ dazzling photographs—it’s the tension it exposes between function and fashion, survival and status.
The 320-page hardcover, published by German house Gestalten, charts the 100 most influential watches since 1900, weaving history, culture, and identity into one sweeping narrative. From the Cartier Santos-Dumont, which tied wristwatches to aviation, to the Rolex Submariner, which helped create dive culture, every entry forces readers to ask: was this watch designed to save lives—or to sell lifestyle?
The Clash Between Function and Culture
Editors Blake Z. Rong and Sean Paul Lorentzen don’t just show the watches—they contextualize them with vintage advertisements, cultural artifacts, and stories of who wore what when conquering Everest, walking on the moon, or fighting trench warfare.
“The Rolex Submariner and GMT-Master, Omega Seamaster, and Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso are not just wildly collected today,” Rong notes, “but they all have roots in function over form in many unexpected ways.”
The book spans aviation, warfare, haute couture, and the quartz revolution. That last chapter is still divisive—was quartz the death of tradition or the democratization of precision? And how do we read today’s resurgence of mechanical watches: as nostalgia, rebellion, or denial of inevitable technological shifts?
A 1937 advertisement for Reverso—which could be considered one of the first sports watches for its innovative reversible-case design tailored to polo players—as seen in Time Machines: How Watches Shaped the Modern World
A Global Legacy
From Hamilton pocket watches to the Cartier Tank and Rolex Oyster, the book highlights how timepieces went to war with the Breitling Navitimer, swam into luxury goods with the Patek Philippe Nautilus and Piaget Polo, and embraced whimsy with Swatch and new microbrands like the C1 Bel Canto.
Seiko’s shock victories over the Swiss establishment in the 1960s are featured as proof that innovation often comes from the margins. As Rong puts it, “watchmaking innovation from diverse brands around the world was instrumental in high-stress situations and therefore needed to push the envelope on precision.”
The Bigger Question
Time Machines isn’t just a catalog; it’s a confrontation with what we value. If Jackie Kennedy’s fake pearls can command five-figure auction bids, and if quartz nearly killed mechanical watchmaking, what does that mean for jewelry today—where lab grown diamonds are challenging the very definition of authenticity and rarity?
👉 Want to understand why lab grown diamonds are overtaking natural stones? Dive into our Lab Grown Diamonds guide.
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