Worn & Wound
Fortis Introduces the Stratoliner S-41 Reentry Edition, with a Heat Treated Titanium Dial
Space, fire, time. These things are elemental, conduits to deep discussions about our place in the universe, and the nature of life itself. What does it all mean? It’s the stuff of 3:00 AM dorm room deep dives, the kinds of conversations that happen after watching 2001 for the first time. Every so often, a piece of art, or an object (or even a watch!) scratches at these ideas. That’s what I started to ponder, anyway, when I first read about the new Fortis Stratoliner S-41 Reentry Edition, a striking new version of their spacefaring chronograph with a unique (literally) dial with one of the more interesting concepts behind it that I’ve seen this year. The highlight here, as you can likely derive from the images, is the dial that has been heat treated by hand. The inspiration comes from spacecraft reentering the earth’s atmosphere. This happens at an incredibly high rate of speed – roughly 15,000 miles per hour. At that velocity, the friction caused by the spacecraft as it comes in contact with the atmosphere essentially turns said spacecraft into a small, fast moving, fireball. Have you seen Apollo 13? Then you know basically how this works. A heat shield designed to control that burn keeps astronauts on board safe, and the critical structure of the spacecraft intact. According to Fortis, every Reentry Edition dial is heat treated by hand and completely unique, thanks to the unpredictable nature of the impact of fire on the titanium surface. The heat produces ...
