Credits: Article and images by Joshua Munchow @ Quill & Pad. See the original article here - https://quillandpad.com/2024/05/06/petermann-bedat-reference-2941-split-seconds-chronograph-best-chronograph-at-the-2023-gphg/
Many say that if you aren’t first, you’re last, and that often rings true. Whether it be in a race in the Olympics or a race to be the first to invent fusion energy, being first often means great things. It isn’t common that people will remember the person that came in second in anything.
I can tell you the first person to break the sound barrier, the first to fly a powered airplane, and the name of the first U.S. president, but it took a Google search to verify who broke the sound barrier second (civilian pilot Herbert Hoover) and made the second working airplane (unsurprisingly, it was also the Wright brothers).
Only now can I remember that John Adams was the second U.S. president thanks to Lin-Manuel Miranda and his hit Broadway show, Hamilton.
But being first isn’t always a guarantee of lasting popularity and fame either. The once ubiquitous VHS tape was a later follower to the original, higher quality Sony Betamax, but cost, recording length, and a missed opportunity to partner with Hollywood for home video rentals meant Betamax lost out and was forgotten as anything other than a “failure.”
An even more widely known product, Oreo cookies, was not at all the first chocolate sandwich cookie with a cream filling. Oreo was an imitation of the four-year-old cookie named Hydrox, but it was able to eclipse the original in popularity resulting in the actual first chocolate sandwich cookie in America being perceived as the knock-off, and it never recovered.
Beyond market success or failure, sometimes being first is truly dangerous. The first person to break the sound barrier and the first to invent the airplane were not the first to try, and some paid with their lives. It can be risky to be the first, something I am certain Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would have told you after writing their last will and testament before taking off on Apollo 11.
In reality, almost every single “first” we talk about was not a first attempt, or even the first version of some invention. The fact that iteration is a huge part of the success involved in achieving any first is sometimes lost on the wider public because we don’t see the possibly hundreds of attempts before success.
We only tend to see or hear about the final step and think that was where it began. Success takes time, practice, and many steps to achieve anything worthwhile, and even that final success is only the beginning of another journey towards bigger accomplishments.
That brings me to the young independent brand Petermann Bédat which just launched its second timepiece, the Reference 2941 Split-Seconds Chronograph, after its successful first model, the 1967 Deadbeat Seconds. That release was actually the second version of the same model as well, with a first iteration debuting six months earlier and receiving some pushback necessitating a bit of a redesign.
The new Reference 2941 Split-Seconds Chronograph is therefore, technically, the brand’s third release and it shows all the hallmarks of building on the success and lessons learned from each previous release.
And it well deservingly took the prize for Best Chronograph at the 2023 GPHG.
————————————————————————————————————–
Credits: Article and images by Joshua Munchow @ Quill & Pad. See the original article here - https://quillandpad.com/2024/05/06/petermann-bedat-reference-2941-split-seconds-chronograph-best-chronograph-at-the-2023-gphg/