In Partnership – Inside The Line: Citizen Promaster Land

By HODINKEE

Of the three families of Promaster watches – Land, Sea, and Air – perhaps the most diverse are those made for adventures and professional activity on terra firma. It’s logical that this should be the case – the variety of possible activities for which the Promaster Land-oriented watches would be appropriate is enormous, and there have been a correspondingly wide range of watches for professional athletes, mountaineers, and explorers produced since the first Promaster Altichron – a watch with a high accuracy altimeter – appeared in 1989.

Citizen Promaster Land watches designed for professional use have often shared certain characteristics with the Sea and Air watches – the Land watches offer both some of the flexible timing features of the Promaster pilot’s watches, as well as the toughness and water resistance of the Sea family of timepieces. An especially significant feature of many of the Land family of watches, is their ability to withstand physical impacts – especially important for sports where body can meet ground at sometimes uncomfortably high speed, including skiing, snowboarding, rock climbing, and mountaineering.

A History Of Toughness

Citizen’s history as an innovator in making watches that can tolerate a more-than-normal shock is a long one. In the 1950s, Citizen developed its own proprietary anti-shock mechanism for mechanical watches, call Parashock. The purpose of the Parashock system was to protect the most vulnerable part of a mechanical watch: the delicate pivots of the balance wheel, whose oscillations give a mechanical watch its precision. So fragile are these pivots that a watch without an anti-shock system, can have the pivots of the balance bent or even broken by something as trivial as a six-inch drop onto a hardwood table.

The Parashock system was tested in public in a most unusual fashion. In 1956, Citizen arranged for a special public demonstration in 11 different cities in Japan, with watches equipped with the new Parashock System. The Parashock Challenge was straightforward: Take watches up in a helicopter to an altitude of 30 meters, and drop them from the chopper to the city street below, in full view of the public. The watches withstood this brutal treatment admirably and …read more