) In fact, the meteorite used in most watch dials comes from slicing up large meteorites discovered all around the planet into razor-thin sections, which are acid-washed to bring out the eye-catching “ Widmanstaetten pattern ” created by the minerals kamacite and taenite, two materials that are otherwise usually not found on earth. He finds them pretty unexciting, and likens their manufacturing process to slicing up Babe Ruth’s bat for collectible baseball cards. Wind, like me, is a little skeptical about meteor dials on watches. Meteorite components used by Jaeger-LeCoultre. Afterward, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the ultra-high-end timepiece was obscene-cosmic chemistry reduced to a mediocre textural gimmick. The price tag was high, the aesthetic mismatched with the stainless steel case and bezel. The second was on a watch dial presented in a velvety Baselworld booth. I was vibing with something billions of years old. When I touched its slick surface, awe froze my mind. The first meteor I remember seeing sat open to the public in a museum. Eric Wind, founder of Wind Vintage, tells me the use of meteorite in watch dials is a relatively new phenomenon, beginning in the late 1980s or early 1990s, probably in the Rolex Daytona. Ferrous meteorites make up the majority of the discovered meteorite mass that’s fallen to earth (Wikipedia says 500 tons of the stuff means about 90% of all mass). They’re also ferrous, composed of metals like nickel and iron, rather than the carbonaceous or chondrite asteroids that researchers like the OSIRIS-REx team study to better understand our place in the universe. The space rocks we use to decorate our watch dials (or in some cases, to build entire watch cases) are meteors, having broken from asteroids and fallen through the atmosphere onto our godforsaken planet. It’s unlikely any of the Bennu asteroid’s material will be used in the dial of a Rolex.
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