The Emergency, Part II: The first watch equipped with an emergency distress beacon

When the idea for the Emergency watch was first discussed in conversations with a NATO official in the 1980s, then-Breitling owner Ernest Schneider had no inkling of the investment of time and resources that would be required to achieve such a technological and lifesaving feat—all in a wristwatch.?

?After the failure of a prototype and a premature patent application in 1988, it would take another six years for a patent application, seven years before any public announcement, and eight long years until the Emergency was on sale, with license approval.?

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(Read Part I of “The Emergency": The first watch equipped with an emergency distress beacon”)??

A key breakthrough in the development of the Emergency is outlined in technical documents from 1994. An earlier doomed design had relied on a clamshell case with an underpowered transmitter that spun round inside the watch to engage the battery contacts and beam out a distress signal.??

The new design added a second, counterweight antenna that would “significantly amplify the radiation power of the transmitter without additional energy consumption.”? From a design standpoint, “The transmitter, the switch and the antennas are arranged in the same case as the clock movement, which makes it possible to reduce the thickness of the watch.”???

Emergency I Prototype P9: Designed to save lives?

A previously unknown pre-production Emergency I, with the serial number P9, was located recently and is now back in its birthplace at Breitling’s headquarters in Grenchen, Switzerland. Like the finished product, P9 houses the Aerospace chronograph, and a French-made transmitter designed to broadcast an AM signal on 121.5 MHz for 0.75 seconds every 2.5 seconds and a Morse code “B” every 60 seconds. At 20 degrees Celsius, it can transmit continuously for 48 hours.??

Most importantly, after almost a decade of development, it worked.??

As the P9 was being tested, there were epic negotiations with regulatory authorities around the world. The new watch was announced to the press in 1995, but couldn’t be sold anywhere until May 1996 when Swiss communications regulators became the first to approve its use.??

Approvals were hard won. Unlike any other watch on the market, the Emergency came with a legally binding contract signed by each owner, with Breitling giving assurances to communication regulators that the watch would only be sold only by specially trained staff.???

Buyers had to provide a photo ID, were supposed to present their pilot’s license, and had to agree to pay for search and rescue costs in the event of “improper use.” Retailers were warned that “Infringement of the sales rules could lead to cancellation of the retailer’s authorization to sell the Emergency watch.”??

In addition to Switzerland, the Emergency had been approved for sale by regulators in Austria, Germany, and the UK. But as late as July 1999, Breitling’s lawyers were still trying to get approval from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to sell the Emergency in the US.??

Federal regulators had to be assured that the new watch was designed specifically for pilots in life-or-death situations, and not simply for “hikers and campers who had lost their way.” The words, “The Emergency is intended for use in connection with aviation,” are underlined in legal submissions, though the first lives it saved were at sea. In June 1997, an Emergency worn by a member of the Mata-Rangi expedition, a reed boat that had set out to sail around the world, guided rescuers to their storm-destroyed raft off the coast of Chile.?

While negotiations continued, an armed forces-designated Emergency was released, transmitting on the 243 MHz frequency used by NATO military aircraft, fulfilling the dream of the conversation that kicked off Schneider’s efforts.?

Making boyhood fantasies come true?

The next step was to petition regulators for a civilian version of the Emergency. Breitling’s arguments were persuasive. Quoting official US statistics, they compared the high rate of accidental activations of the ELTs fitted to aircraft—up to 97%—to the thousands of manually operated Emergency watch ELTs that had been sold in the preceding three years without triggering a single false alarm.??

The FCC granted permission to sell the watch publicly in the US in the year 2000. Meanwhile, US patent officials perhaps understood better than most what Ernest Schneider sought to achieve. They looked back to previous patents and placed the Emergency in the world of imagination.?

Their list of precedents for Schneider’s creation included an impossible 1957 spy watch (“a portable radio set which cannot be recognized as being a radio”) and, in turn, a 1946 newspaper cartoon strip in which the detective Dick Tracey introduces the “astounding wrist radio” containing “tiny tubes, battery, microphone, and a speaker.”? Dick Tracey’s Wrist Radio went on to be a popular children’s toy in the ’70s. It seems that the patent office could see that the pragmatic Ernest Schneider was making boyhood fantasies come true.?

By the time US officials caught up with Breitling’s vision, the Emergency had already come of age. In November 1998, Breitling aviation director Stefano Albinati traveled to the Breitling-sponsored Orbiter 3 balloon team in the Swiss Alps and presented the Emergency to pilots Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones. The watches were vital, potentially lifesaving tools for the pair who would famously complete the first non-stop round-the-world balloon flight four months later.??

The blue dial Emergency handed to Brian Jones that day (he chose the color because it reminded him of his days in the Royal Air Force) was thought to have been lost. Albinati had filled in the paperwork writing “Orbiter 3” in the space for the type of license the owner held. Auctioned for charity, and then sold on, the model was hidden away for years in watch collector Colin Towns’ safe in England.???

Looking back after a quarter of a century, Brian Jones’ memories of that watch sum up the purpose of the entire Emergency development program: “We had several location aids—one in our life jackets, another in an emergency pack, and one fixed in the capsule. But the watch was the only one permanently strapped to our bodies and in a dire emergency, such as a fire or catastrophic failure of the balloon envelope, it may have been the only one we could access.”?

Emergency II: the first dual distress beacon watch?

Despite the commercial success of the Emergency—thousands sold consistently each year—and the 20 or more lives it's saved (including, famously, Sir Richard Branson’s), Breitling did not rest on its laurels.??

Development continued and the complex satellite-enabled dual-frequency Emergency II was launched in 2013, overcoming even higher technical and regulatory hurdles.?By then, Breitling’s estimate of the development cost of its life-saving watch was an astonishing $7 million.??

With a redesign of the Emergency expected in the coming years and the 30th anniversary of the first piece sold in Switzerland in the spring of 1996, the Emergency remains a force for good, an instrument for professionals in the most critical and dire situations. And it’s still out there, still saving lives.?

Discover more on Breitling.com.

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