Complications · Lesson 8 of 10
The Chronograph
A stopwatch built into your watch: pushers, totalizers, and how to read them.
A chronograph is a stopwatch built into a watch — the complication that timed motor races, fighter sorties, and, on Apollo 13, a 14-second engine burn that helped bring three astronauts home. It's also the complication most likely to confuse a new owner, because its biggest hand doesn't do what you think.
00:00.00
The big violet hand is the chronograph seconds — it only moves when you're timing. The little dial at 6 o'clock is the watch's normal running seconds, ticking away regardless. The counter at 12 totals your elapsed minutes.
Reading the dial
- Central chrono hand — the stopwatch seconds. Parked at 12 until you start timing. One lap = one minute.
- Minute totalizer — a subdial (usually 30 minutes) counting how many laps the chrono hand has made.
- Running seconds — a small subdial showing the watch's own seconds, always ticking. Proof the watch is alive even when the chronograph sleeps.
Pusher etiquette
Top pusher (2 o'clock): start, stop, restart. Bottom pusher (4 o'clock): reset — and on traditional mechanical chronographs, only after stopping. Slamming reset mid-run can hurt older movements (modern ones usually just ignore it). And unless the manual says otherwise, don't work the pushers underwater.
Words you'll meet
A tachymeter is the scale on many chronograph bezels: time one mile or kilometre, and the chrono hand points at your average speed. A flyback resets and restarts with a single press; a rattrapante (split-seconds) has two stacked hands for timing two things at once. All ways of asking a wrist-sized machine to do more.
Knowledge check
3 quick questions to lock in what you just learned.