Living With The Past: A Week With A 1940's Vintage Gallet Chronograph Watch

The fact that the subdials are placed so close to the edges of the dial are an indication of the movement size. Compactness was a selling point, and the case in this watch is literally wrapped around the movement.The first thing I noticed when I received this watch is how small it is in comparison to most watches in my collection. The Gallet is only 30mm wide without the crown, although it is about as thick as most other watches (mainly due to the tall crystal). 30mm is a woman's size watch by today's standards. A few of the images are of the Gallet in comparison to two other watches. One, is a manually wound 38mm wide German Marcello C watch, and the other is of a 45mm wide Citizen Campanola Grand Complication. You can see the drastic size differences, especially when worn on the wrist. Funny enough, the small size of this particular does not bother me much, even though I tend to stay away from small watches. It is one of the most legible watches I know own, and for what its worth, size doesn't matter with this watch. So while I still feel as though the watch is petite, I am not too bothered by its minuscule stature (see how I have to keep justifying that to myself).Despite the small size of the watch, you always seem to know it is there on your wrist.So don't feel bad if you've never heard of them. This is probably the only place on the Internet you'll see a picture of this particular watch. Gallet was big for a while selling aviation and military watches, so they have more of a functional rather than luxury heritage. Though in such times, a functional watch such as this was only reserved for those who could afford it as most people flying for pleasure were not of average means. Coincidentally, one of President Harry Truman's watch was a Gallet Officer's Chronograph that was similar to this watch, and likely manufactured in the same era. So this is a 30 minute chronograph with a subsidiary seconds dial in a bicompax orientation. The other subdial register is for the elapsed chronograph minutes. One of the rare traits about this Gallet is the vertical orientation of the subdials (as most are in a horizontal orientation). Other Gallet watches with similar looks and function have horizontally orientated subdials, and I have never see another one such as this model.