THE AUDIENCE LIGHTS go down and the spotlight swings round. The host of Which Watch, ITV’s new Saturday night gameshow blockbuster, turns to you: ‘Name as many models of vintage Omega as you can in 30 seconds.’ Barely a moment, you’re straight in. ‘Speedmaster, Seamaster, De Ville...’ You might manage Flightmaster, Marinemaster and a couple more before you grind to a halt, but the chances of you choosing ‘Chronostop’ are slim.
It’s not surprising. Omega made comfortably fewer than 200,000 Chronostops in the watch’s brief life from 1966/7 to 1970. Given the firm has shifted more than 1.5m Moonswatches since March 2022, it’s clear that the Chronostop was hardly one of its big sellers. It makes plenty of sense on paper: 35mm case (tiny by today’s standards but neat and unobtrusive); a choice of 17-jewel, 21,600bph movements (original cal.865 or later cal.920). Even better, it has one of the coolest complications out there, a monopusher chronograph: you can start, stop and reset the stopwatch with just one button.