SAVING THE DAY

Bovet Fleurier SA has created a world timer that takes Daylight Saving Time into consideration, combined with a roller system display that allows travellers to calibrate their watch to any of the 24 global time zones. Meet the Récital 28 'Prowess 1'.

- Chitra Lohani Saharan

It was during the start of COVID that I was trying to figure out what time it is in various cities around the world, but it was always complicated because some cities changed to Daylight Saving Time and others didn’t, and the USA changed before Europe, and Europe changed back earlier than the USA. In the past, we had addressed celestial time with displays of the night sky, equations of time, moon phases, the earth from the sky, and more. Now, I decided we had to turn our attention to civil time, because, after all, Daylight Saving Time is political— countries decide whether to adopt it or not,” says Pascal Raffy, owner of Bovet SA.

Innovations and discoveries pave the way for an easier life, and the world of watchmaking is no different. The creation of a tourbillon, which countered the effects of gravity on the precision of a pocket watch, resulted in precise timepieces, and with the rise of global travel, GMT and world timers were introduced to help travelers keep track of different time zones. However, what has stayed unaccounted for in watches is Daylight Saving Time (DST), adopted by 70 countries across the globe.