Teddy Baldassarre
What is a GMT Watch?
GMT watches, and other types of watches with useful complications for travelers, are enjoying a surge of popularity these days, with watchmakers large and small stepping up to produce travel watches with both user-friendly mechanics and attractive design, at a variety of price points. Yet, if you’re new to the watch game, you still might be a bit curious about what is a GMT watch, how to read and set them, and how one style differs from another. In this feature, we attempt to address all the pertinent questions you may want answered before purchasing a GMT or any style of watch with the ability to show multiple time zones. What is a GMT watch? GMT is the abbreviation for “Greenwich Mean Time,” the system of world timekeeping based on the calculation of mean solar time from the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London. Established in 1884 at the International Meridian Conference, the Prime Meridian was conceived as a straight line running from the North Pole to the South Pole directly through Greenwich, serving as the point of zero degrees longitude from which 24 separate time zones divide the Earth: the Eastern Time Zone of the United States, for example, is designated as GMT -5 (i.e., five hours west of Greenwich, which is GMT 0). A GMT watch is essentially a timekeeper designed in that same utilitarian spirit, allowing its wearer to read the time in at least two time zones simultaneously. Many such watches actually use the initials “GMT” in their model names, whi...