Svalbard - History, Models and Owners' Reviews

There are a lot of ways to split the day in two, like your electricity supplier, but the two parts, peak hours and off-peak hours are far from equal, or like the alarm clock that displays AM/PM but it is not very practical, we never greet people "good morning!", or "good afternoon!" depending on this display. On the other hand, a question of protocol arises, how do you know if you should say good morning or good evening? Relying on the sun is not necessarily a good solution, there are days when it is impossible to see it, days when daylight disappears in the middle of the afternoon, or even earlier, as we get closer to the polar circle. Hence the idea of splitting the day into two equal parts of 12 hours, a dark part until 6 a.m., a white part, until 6 p.m. Conventionally white is at the top, when the sun is high in the sky and black at the bottom, when the sun passes below the horizon line and lights up the other side of the earth. I had never bought an automatic Svalbard watch before, it is thicker than the quartz watches I have bought so far (12.85mm) but the glass is flat and it works. This watch is powered by a Seiko NH34A automatic movement, there is nothing to complain about. It is visible because of the transparent case back, but there is no particular decoration on the oscillating weight. The question I ask myself when wearing this watch on a daily basis is why there is no Lume on the hands which are nevertheless suitable for it. They have a large white coating which makes them very visible in the night part, but depending on the lighting conditions there may be a readability problem in the day part. Why? modern watches tend to spread luminescent coating everywhere, here it would be logical and useful. It may be to represent the silence of the far north, or the silence of space, a sort of reference to the song Vladimir Vissotsky, on white silence, https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=ucx65L0c4ak. The absence of luminescence is a way of representing silence. The Seiko movement makes very little noise, it is not a particularly pleasant sound, but it is almost inaudible on this watch, so it is not that which will break the silence. The other music that this watch can make you think of is the soundtrack of the film March of the Penguins by Emilie Simon. The Antarctic region and the black and white of the emperor penguins definitely make you think of this two-tone dial. Adjectives: polar, extreme, dual, refined, two-tone, yin yang

I dreamed of the Breitling Navitimer Cosmonaute. Found a Svalbard watch with a 24-hour dial on the web. Sold out edition. Contacted their German agent. Bought it in early December. It stopped within a week. Sent it back. Returned it 2 months later. Works for 3 days. Stops. Definitely stopped for over a week. Radio silence from Svalbard and my seller.

This minimalist-looking watch, of Scandinavian design, and very simple challenges several preconceptions of the conformity in which we bathe without realizing it. -The hands turn in the indirect direction (anti-trigonometric) -The crown is on the right -The small hand is for the hours and the large one for the minutes -The hands are full and point towards the railway from the outside Well this watch challenges these commonly accepted principles. The indirect direction has no real reason to exist except that most of us do it like that. A bit like driving on the right, the opposite works very well or even better: in the United Kingdom for example. Changing direction can lead to mistakes, which is why it is often preferred not to change. But changing allows you to do some healthy gymnastics for the brain to keep it in shape. It is a very simple brain sport. Similarly, reversing the hands is done quite well. The logic of the big hand for the minutes is to have a greater precision in reading. Here the problem is solved by making a second railway and an indicator that points precisely to the minutes. The second hand is red and extremely visible which allows to clearly see the direct direction of rotation and to avoid possible reading errors linked to its sinister non-conformity. The crown is at three o'clock as is often the case, but since we turn in an unusual direction it is on the left side which has the advantage of not bothering the hand if we wear the watch on the left wrist (although personally the crown on the right has never bothered me in the least and since the watch is quartz it does not pose a problem for winding). As for the manufacturing, it comes from a Chinese factory and it is rather neat for this price range (around 100 euros), the movement is a Japanese quartz Miyota 2037. As is often the case with Svalbard, it is a limited series of 500 copies and each copy has its number engraved on the back around the polar bear, the mascot of the brand. But also an animal that is better admired from afar given that last summer on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard (the name of the brand by the way) a French woman in her forties was injured by a polar bear that was subsequently shot. There are said to be 3,500 polar bears in the Svalbard archipelago, hence the choice of the mascot. If you turn the watch over, you can dream of these northern lands (only 1,050 km from the North Pole), or imagine the hands turning clockwise behind the engraving of the bear and the quartz mechanism because if you turn an anticlockwise mechanism over, it turns clockwise. Or think of a Jules Verne novel where polar bears are fought like wintering in the ice. In short, it is a watch with a very simple appearance that breaks many watchmaking codes, which is well thought out to be readable and not to make a mistake in reading the time. It is practical, beneficial and opens up the imagination of the far north and this fascinating archipelago of Svalbard. Corresponding adjectives: Anti-conformist, minimalist, sporty-cerebral