Buzz Aldrin may have been only the second man to walk on the moon, but he was the first to wear a watch on its surface. In 1962 Nasa visited a jewellery shop in Houston, bought some timepieces, and subjected them to what agency historians describe as ‘exhaustive tests aimed at determining performance reliability in the conditions likely to be experienced during EVA’. That acronym stands for ‘extravehicular activity’, which means moon walking, which means temperatures ranging from -250 to +250ºF. The agency also exposed the watches to ‘accelerations of 12gs’ and the violent shaking of a ‘vibration table’. The only one to survive was the Omega Speedmaster. Despite congressional pressure to buy American, Nasa went Swiss, and ordered one for every astronaut.

Neil Armstrong left his in the lunar module as a replacement for the ship’s timer (American-made), which had malfunctioned. Aldrin wore his strapped to the outside of his surface suit, because, as he said recently, he wanted it to do ‘more than just sit inside the spacecraft’. A few years later, back on earth, he lost it. But on a warm Wednesday evening in June, at an event to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, he could be found at the Omega store on Fifth Avenue, looking at replacements. (Aldrin, at ease in public, unlike the rest of his Apollo crew, is a regular on the promotional circuit, and was also featured in a recent Louis Vuitton campaign.)

Source: London Review of Books (subscription)