What is the GMT time zone in the USA?

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For world travelers, a GMT time zone watch is the most practical timepiece for daily travel needs. In the early 1700s, William Hogarth created a series of paintings that described the lunacy that was brought onto the explorers at the time by the “longitude problem”. At this point in history, determining longitude was no easy endeavor. Some of the greatest minds at the time during the 1700s were working towards finding a method to determine the longitude in an effort to help provide safe navigation passages for vessels at sea. 

Operating a GMT watch takes some practice, but once you become familiar with a handful of time zones, it is not difficult at all. Basically, you need to know two time zones at any given time – your home time zone, or the time zone of the city you are in at the moment. You will also need to know the time zone of the city and whose current time you would like to know.

GMT time zone watches are an interesting piece of technology, in that even if you are a seasoned watch collector, it is still entirely possible to have never come across one before. Because of that, there are a lot of people, both inside the watchmaking community and outside of it, who are completely unfamiliar with this term.

How to tell if you have a GMT Time Zone watch 

What distinguishes a GMT time zone watch from a regular timepiece is its additional hand. Most timepieces have three hands on the face for the hour, minute, and seconds, respectively. A GMT time zone watch has an additional fourth hand that rotates once around the face every four hours and corresponds directly to Greenwich Mean Time.

How to read a GMT Time Zone Watch

In order to read a GMT time zone watch, you will have to have a passing familiarity with time zones, or at least be able to look them up on the internet. By knowing what time zone you are starting in and what time zone of the city you need to look up is in, you can very quickly figure out the time by rotating the bezel on the watch. Below is a quick example to help you further demonstrate this principle.

Popular GMT Time Zone watches

Rolex GMT-II Master Watch

Even people who aren’t overly familiar with GMT time zone-style watches have heard of this watch, and for good reason – people love this watch, primarily because of its color scheme, which has led many collectors to dub it the “Pepsi” Rolex. While it is hard to find because of its popularity and price, it is absolutely worth getting a hold of if you’re able to do so.

IWC Automatic Pilot GMT Watch

IWC is world-renowned for making high-quality and highly durable chronographs, so it more than stands to reason that they would produce an excellent tool watch like the Automatic Pilot GMT Time Zone Watch. Additionally, this watch has one of the most unique features that we have seen in quite some time – a bezel that has the names of different cities around the world on it so that you can keep track of the time there.

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