Bremont have turned to the genius of World War II Bletchley Park codebreaker Alan Turing and his team as inspiration for a new watch which will contain historical artefacts from the codebreaking machine that turned the war around for Britain, enabling Bletchley Park codebreakers to intercept and decrypt ciphers being relayed by the German Enigma and Lorenz machines.
The Codebreaker timepiece is inspired by a classic 40’s officer’s watch and will be made with a flyback chronograph and GMT automatic movement. It will also incorporate pine from Hut 6, which was the centre of the operations to decrypt the messages of the German Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe Enigma ciphers, and paper from one of the few remaining punch cards, which were used to analyse the vast amount of coded data created from the daily Enigma communications. The rotor of the watch will be made in part from the wheel of an original Enigma machine.
In the early years of the war Britain came within two weeks of defeat as massive shipping losses depleted vital supplies. German U-Boats, commanded by the seemingly unbreakable Enigma codes, were able to ply the Atlantic almost at will with devastating consequences on allied shipping. Secretly cracking the Enigma code with the Bombe machine, an early forerunner of today’s computers, turned the tide.
Talking about the watch, Bremont co-founder Nick English said: “Mechanically we have made some considerable movement developments and incorporated materials that have never been built into a watch before. By moving the chronograph dials, building a flyback chronograph function and GMT second timezone we have accomplished a wonderful mechanical timepiece.
“Both Giles and I were inspired by the ‘Bombe machine’ and the rotor balance is based on the Bombe’s drums. Each watch will have its limited edition number embedded into the case barrel, which will be made of Bakelite as per the original Bombe machine.
Hut 6 is part of the current restoration programme and fragments of its floorboards, on which codebreaking giants, such as Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman walked, have been incorporated into the watch crown.”
