Reference Points Understanding The Rolex GMT-Master

One of the crowning achievements of humankind in the last century was the mastery of flight. When the Wright Brothers launched their Flyer into the seaside breeze of Kitty Hawk, N.C., a door was opened onto possibilities previously only imagined in myths or dreams. The first scheduled commercial flight took place in Florida a little more than 100 years ago, from St. Petersburg to neighboring Tampa. And the subsequent popularization of commercial air travel in the 1950s and '60s allowed civilians to go places with greater speed than any previous generation. But while the possibility to arrive on another continent in mere hours was certainly game-changing, it created problems too, particularly as it Replica Watches pertained to keeping and adjusting to time.

Douglas DC-8-32 N804PA of Pan American World Airways at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport in 1967 (Credit: RuthAS/Wikimedia Commons).

There was no longer just the time. Rather, there was the time where one was and the time where one was going. This was a daily concern for the commercial pilots crisscrossing the world's time zones in the nascent commercial aviation industry. One of the great American companies of the last century, Pan American World Airways, partnered with a Swiss watch brand by the name of Rolex to see if it could make them a watch capable of telling the time in more places than one. It is from this overture that came one of today's most collectible, historically important, and iconic Rolex sport watches: The GMT-Master. Replica rolex watches
The GMT-Master didn't come from a blank slate. We can trace its roots back to other classic Rolex sport watches, perhaps starting with the Rolex Zerographe reference 3346 circa 1937 with a rotating bezel, but continuing to the Submariner and Turn-O-Graph models that Rolex introduced in 1953. These watches featured rotating aluminum bezels for timing elapsed minutes, and they served as the platform upon which Rolex was to develop the first GMT-Master. To this day, if you think of a watch made for tracking time in more places than one, there is a very good chance that the blue-and-red bezeled Rolex GMT-Master, graduated for 24 hours, is the image that appears in your mind's eye. What started as a purpose-built tool for pilots has transcended that role to become a totem of a cosmopolitan, urbane, and well-traveled life. As such, it's been worn not just by pilots and navigators, but by famous actors, entertainers, artists, thinkers, and musicians – the people whose personalities and style influence us on a daily basis.

The watch collecting community continues to show great interest in the GMT-Master's vintage references. And the current collection of GMT-Master IIs accounts for several of the most sought-after watches at retail. The Rolex GMT-Master is, in all its many forms, quite simply the most famous travel watch the world has ever seen.

The first and the most recent Pepsi-bezeled examples.

Wherever possible, I've provided production dates for the references in this article. It is crucial to understand that what the numbers on the inside caseback tell us regards the case production, but that watches were often not assembled until a year later and then sold after that, sometimes many years later. In the mid-'70s, Rolex ceased printing case production dates on the inside of casebacks. For those watches, the serial numbers printed on the case between the lugs offer the best insight into when a watch was made, but this too is something of an imprecise science.

It's been 65 years since Rolex launched the first GMT-Master, and in that time, there have been a great many variations if you take into account all of the gem-set examples and different strap / bracelet configurations. Showing you every single one of them would probably have been impossible, so instead we've decided to focus on the watches that we think tell the story of the world's most famous travel watch, from 1955 to the present.

In order to do this, we've once again tapped Eric Wind, former HODINKEE contributor and the proprietor of Wind Vintage. Eric reached well into his network of friends and collectors to bring us more than 30 world-class examples of the Rolex GMT-Master to include in this article.