WHAT WE LOVE:

On September 1st, 1983, a Korean Air Boeing 747 was shot down by Russian fighter jets. Owing to a small navigational error in the flight deck, the aircraft had inadvertently strayed into Russian airspace without proper identification. A cascading series of mistakes lead to the shootdown, and death of all on board.

Within 15 days of the tragedy, the United States government announced that their Global Positioning System of satellite navigation would become available for use by Civil Aviation worldwide by 1988, to prevent future incidents. The open-sourcing of the GPS network by the US military has changed all of our lives in many unquantifiable ways, from tracking aircraft to tracking our uber eats orders.

The utility of GPS was slowly adopted for civilian use over the decade from its introduction to civil aviation, it would eventually lead to this watch from Casio, the first GPS-capable watch in 1999. This Casio Pro Trek model can link up to multiple satellites to provide the wearer with their location in coordinates on the dial. The watch was truly innovative, then and today.

I find this watch, and everything it represents to be one of the great joys of watch collecting and study. 16 years after a terrible accident, watchmaking had managed to incorporate cutting-edge technology into something that could be worn every day, and provide utility beyond any watchmaker's dreams only a few decades ago.