A torpilleur is a small, swift-moving boat designed to carry torpedos into battle against larger, more heavily armed battleships (I googled it so you didn’t have to.) With its new Marine Torpilleur Military, unveiled last week ahead of its formal introduction at SIHH 2018 in Geneva, Ulysse Nardin pays tribute to its storied past as a supplier of pocket chronometers to many of the world’s navies in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Nearly all of Ulysse Nardin’s modern watches draw at least some of their design and technical inspiration from the highly accurate marine chronometers that put the Le Locle, Switzerland-based brand on the horological map in the 1800s. But the Marine Torpilleur Military is the most direct homage to those vintage sea captain’s pocketwatches that I can recall encountering. (UN’s press release refers to it, in fact, as a “direct descendant.”) The watch’s 44-mm stainless steel case ? with a fluted bezel and oversized screw-down crown ensuring a water resistance of 50 meters ? has a sand-blasted finish and is topped off with an antireflective sapphire crystal.
The highly legible dial features large, Arabic numerals at the hour markers and vintage-style hour and minute hands in the center; small seconds are displayed on a subdial at 6 o’clock. In the center of that subdial are two other notable elements, the initials “C.W.”, denoting it as a “chronometer watch;” and a red se...