A cross-hair divides the watch into quadrants, but is really only visible on the top half of the dial due to the positioning of the small seconds scale. A large white section in the middle contains the Longines signature and a small seconds register, which itself is sectored in a way that mirrors the outer dial. Directly inside of that we have a gray ring with an attractive brushed finish that features long hash marks that run the entire width of the ring to denote the hours and shorter markings to indicate the minutes. The outermost sector is actually a blank white border that frames the rest of the dial. The Longines Sector is fairly simple as these dials go. These watches really take off, in my opinion, when different finishes are used across each sector, which helps you see the time more clearly at a glance and also can be a showcase for excellent finishing (or, the opposite: a finishing weak spot, marred by sloppy transitions). There are many ways that a sector dial can be executed, but they pretty much all involve the use of concentric circles to divide the minutes, hours, and seconds. That a watch like this would have been worn by the intellectually curious for use in their own pursuits is endlessly appealing to me, a nerd in so many ways who identifies with this type of tool watch much more strongly than the type that’s designed to be submerged under 300 meters of ocean water. The subtle mixture of finishing techniques is very rewarding up closeĪnother way to think of it, is that a watch like this, in the 1940s, would have been something of a tool watch for nerds. These dials, which have their origins in the 1930s and 40s, are split into easily readable sections for the purpose of taking precise measurements, and you can imagine them being used as tools by physicians, scientists, or academic types who might have a need for keeping accurate time and recognizing the passing of it at a glance.It’s utilitarian in a very practical, old fashioned way, and less about accomplishing a specific task (like a modern dive watch, for example) than it is about being consistently ready to perform very generally. The key, for me, in understanding the appeal of the sector dial is in one of the myriad of other names a dial like this may have been called over the years: a “scientific” dial. Before jumping into what makes the dial of this particular Longines so attractive, it’s worth taking a beat to think through sector dials more generally. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that other elements of the watch have been almost intentionally diminished or subdued to accentuate the dial. The dial is the clear star of the show here.
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