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Watch Bezels
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The bezel is an important component on a watch. It can be decorative or utilitarian in its function. Put in simple terms, it is the ring which surrounds the face of the watch and usually serves to hold the crystal in place. Where ladies' watches are concerned, it is quite common to see diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds or other precious stones set on the bezel. There are numerous watch manufacturers that produce men's watches with diamond-set and other decorative bezels, as well. Franck Muller and Piaget are two relevant examples. However, not all bezel applications are decorative in nature--here are just two examples where bezels perform specific functions on wristwatches:
TIME MEASUREMENT
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Watches such as the Girard-Perregaux Sea Hawk have a rotating time-elapse bezel that depending upon design, may turn in one or both directions. Such bezels are numbered with a 60-minute scale with an arrow marker set at 0.
If you are scuba diving and have 25 minutes of air remaining in your tank, it's clearly very important that you know exactly when it is time to begin making your way to the surface.
To utilize this bezel function with this example in mind, turn the ring so that zero is 25 minutes ahead of the current time. When the minute hand reaches zero on the bezel, you are out of time. Practical applications in everyday life can be extended to common events such as cooking, and parking meters. |
SPEED MEASUREMENT
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On other watches, the Omega Speedmaster Professional for example, you can use the bezel to help you compute speed based on travel time. To do so, start the chronograph function at a mile indicator. At the next mile indicator, the point on the scale that is adjacent to the chronograph central second hand is your MPH speed.
It is not limited to just miles per hour, however. If the distance is measured in kilometers, the bezel can also determine speed according to the metric standard. |
In summary, the tachymeter simply projects units traveled per hour, be it miles, kilometers, or even football fields. Hopefully, this quick explanation has given you a better understanding of functional bezels. Once one becomes used to using such functions, they become second nature. Therefore, if you have a functional bezel, "playing" with it regularly is the best way to gain familiarity. Once you get used to how they work, such bezels can become quite handy in a range of situations.
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