Glashütte's claim on the chronograph is older than most people assume. The Saxon town was building wristwatches with short-time measurement more than eighty years ago, and in the early 1940s its watchmakers produced the UROFA calibre 59, the first modern Glashütte wristwatch chronograph. Its construction followed technical principles that ran ahead of the standards of the period. The two watches Glashütte Original launches this month are the current answer to the same brief.
Both are 41 mm in stainless steel. Both run the automatic Calibre 37-24. Both carry a Panorama Date. The distance between them sits entirely in the dial, and it is a real distance.
The Navigator
The Senator Chronograph Navigator descends from the pilot's watches of the 1940s, and it wears that lineage honestly. The dial is matt deep black lacquer with solid luminous Arabic numeral appliqués, engraved luminous hour markers, and hour and minute hands coated in Super-LumiNova. The central chronograph seconds hand, the 30-minute counter and the small seconds are finished in white lacquer, which is the whole point: at speed, in bad light, you need the running time and the measured time to separate instantly.
The recessed counters carry a vinyl record finish, a detail that shows up under raking light and disappears at a glance. Logo, inscriptions, minute track and the rehaut tachymeter scale are printed in glossy white, and the tachymeter gives you average speed off the central seconds hand.
The pilot's crown is the giveaway. Oversized, gripped, engraved with the mirrored 'G', flanked by mushroom pushers at 2 and 4 o'clock. These are operating decisions dressed as design ones. A navigation watch had to work through gloves and vibration, and the hardware here reflects that inheritance rather than gesturing at it.
The Senator Chronograph
The lighter model looks back further, to the observation watches Glashütte produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for maritime navigation. Those were robust precision pocket watches built to be read against a chart, and the dial follows that logic.
Galvanic silver with a fine grainé finish. Applied solid gold Roman numerals with a blue coating. Blued steel hands for hours, minutes, small seconds and the 30-minute counter, with a blue-coated central chronograph seconds hand. The 30-minute counter and small seconds sit in exact symmetry, and at 6 o'clock the Panorama Date is framed in white gold.
The case is 41 mm across, 12.9 mm high and 48.5 mm lug to lug. Glashütte Original calls the profile slim. What the numbers actually show is efficiency: the calibre alone stands 8 mm tall, so the case wraps it in under 5 mm of steel. For an integrated automatic chronograph carrying a date, that is tightly built.
On The Wrist
I handled this one with both the alligator and the synthetic strap, and the thing that stays with me is the blue.
Photographs flatten it. In the metal, the coated gold numerals and the blued hands behave like two different colours depending on where the light is coming from. Held at one angle they read as a deep, almost black navy against the grainé silver, and the dial reads as a monochrome. Tilt the wrist a few degrees and the same numerals fire bright and electric. It happens fast and it happens constantly, so the dial keeps moving through the day in a way a printed marker never does.
This is what applied solid gold appliqués with a blue coating buy you, and it is the reason the specification sheet matters. The depth comes from the material.
Calibre 37-24
This is where the money went.
The 37-24 is an integrated column-wheel chronograph with flyback, 34.2 mm across and 8 mm high, carrying central chronograph seconds, a 30-minute counter, small seconds and the Panorama Date. Integrated means the chronograph was designed into the movement from the start, which is the harder and more expensive route, and the one that produces the crisp pusher feel people pay for.
Flyback means a single press stops, resets and restarts the timing. It exists because pilots needed successive intervals timed without a three-button sequence, and it remains the most useful chronograph complication in daily use.
The specification underneath is serious: 4 Hz, 70 hours of running time, 47 jewels, a silicon balance spring for magnetic and thermal stability, solid gold regulating screws on the balance rim, and Glashütte Original's swan-neck fine adjustment. The silicon spring and the gold screws together tell you the manufactory wanted modern stability with traditional regulation, and paid for both.
Through the sapphire case back: bevelled edges, polished steel components, blued screws, the three-quarter plate with Glashütte stripe finish, and a newly developed heavily skeletonised rotor with a 21-carat gold oscillation weight carrying the mirrored 'G'.
Glashütte Original produces up to 95% of its own movement components in-house, along with its dials. On a watch where the dial does this much of the work, that vertical integration stops being a marketing line and starts being the explanation.
A Detail That Matters
Both watches come on black or blue Louisiana alligator, a sand-coloured synthetic strap, or a stainless steel bracelet, all with a tool-free quick-change system. Glashütte Original has now extended that mechanism to the folding clasp, so the clasp moves between straps without tools.
It is a small piece of engineering and it will get used more than the flyback. Quick-change lugs solved half the problem and left owners with a clasp married to one strap. This closes it. Swapping between the alligator and the synthetic took seconds.
Both are available worldwide from August 2026, through Glashütte Original boutiques and authorised retailers.
