This limited edition Codebreaker watch by the English Bremont house symbolises the epic battle between the Bletchley Park cryptographers and the German Enigma cipher machine.
“We have a passion for watches, for history and all things mechanical in our blood”. The Code-breaker timepiece is the perfect expression of this Bremont team declaration. This elegant chronograph is inspired by an official model dating to the 1940s and equipped with a great many resources amongst which its flyback functions and its second time zone stand out.
CAPTAIN JERRY ROBERTS, VETERAN OF BLETCHLEY PARK, IN A PERIOD PHOTO. ROBERTS TOOK PART IN THE BREMONT
CODEBREAKER PRESENTATION WHICH TOOK PLACE IN JUNE.
Codebreaker is also a piece of living history encompassing elements which come from Bletchley Park itself, the legendary British cryptology department given the task of deciphering the secret messages of the German armed forces in World War Two.
It has been estimated that the ingenuity of brilliant mathematicians such as Alan Turing and the huge efforts of the whole Bletchley Park staff brought forward Allied victory by as much as two years saving incalculable suffering and human life.
It was a formidable enterprise if we consider that the rotor system used by the infamous German Enigma cipher machine made possible an infinite variety of different combinations. And as Codebreaker is also equipped with a rotor, a fundamental component of its automatic movement, Bremont has decided to incorporate a fragment of the original Enigma rotor into it.
This tops even the reproduction of one of the cylinders which made up the so-called Bombe machine used at Bletchley Park to speed up the decryption of the Enigma messages.
Saving time was effectively an absolute priority as once the war began the Germans adopted measures such as an increase in the number of rotors from 3 to 5 and changed its settings every 24 hours.
But that’s not all. A further ace up Bletchley Park’s sleeve during the war was the establishment of a register of decrypted Enigma messages made in the form of punch cards. Inserted into special machines these allowed only solutions which were compatible with the Enigma algorithm to pass through thus drastically reducing the number of attempts necessary to decipher new messages.
It is precisely these period punch cards, with their printed numbers, which appear on the edges of the case of each Codebreaker timepiece and indicate its limited edition number. There will be 240 watches with a stainless steel case and 50 in pink gold costing 18,500 USD and 33,995 USD respectively. The crown of each watch will be decorated with fragments of pine from the floor in Bletchley Park’s Hut 6 in which the Enigma codes used by the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe were decrypted.
Codebreaker is the result of the partnership between this British watchmaker and the Bletchley Park Foundation. Part of the proceeds will go towards the restoration of this historic complex in North East London.
Such fund raising operations are not new to Bremont. Before Bletchley Park it was the national Royal Navy Museum which benefited from the sale of another Bremont watch, the HMS Victory model. And on the subject of victory, we believe that for those who wear a cronograph as unique as Codebreaker on their wrists every day will be a miniature V-Day.
