Omega Speedmaster 'MK40' Triple Calendar Automatic, c. 1999

Dealer description — Analog/Shift

Why We Love It Our love of Omega Speedmasters should be pretty apparent - with lengthy descriptions and stories recounting the tales of the original rocket men and their magnificent machines regularly gracing these electronic pages. With that said, the majority of our attention on Speedmasters has been focused on the Professional and Pre-Professional line, which has been a disservice to the other facets of the Speedmaster collection, which are numerous. From the earliest attempts to create automatic variants to their more recent Co-Axial models, there's a lot to love in the collection - and its easy to see why some collectors focus entirely on Speedmasters! This particular model, a Reference 3820.53 Speedmaster Automatic Triple Date - better known as the Mark 40 - was introduced around 1996 and produced into the early 2000s. The model features a 39mm 'Reduced' size case with automatic Calibre 1152 movement with a litany of complications including day, date, and month indicators alongside a 24 hour day/night indicator alongside a chronograph mechanism with center seconds, 30-minute counter, and 12-hour register. In short, everything and the kitchen sink! This example dates to circa 1999 and is in outstanding condition throughout with an untouched case and flawless dial with vibrant luminous material and no fade. Popularized recently by a tribute model offered by Hodinkee, the MK40's colorful dial and functionality stands out in a crowd, and the genuine article offers a tremendous value amongst collectable Speedmaster models in particular! The Speedmaster Story "Contact Light." After touching the lander down on the lunar surface, Buzz Aldrin transmitted to Houston control these words, nary more than a whisper, the first communication between human beings not concurrently on the same planet. When Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon for the first time, his Omega Speedmaster was in the module serving as a backup for its electric timer that had malfunctioned. It was Aldrin who, following Armstrong to become the second human to walk on the moon, introduced the Speedmaster to the lunar surface. Today, Omega has become synonymous with the Apollo missions, the moon landing and space exploration in general. The provenance of the brand, driven by the incredible reliability and functionality of the watches that they produced throughout the space era is second to none. But at the heart of the moon missions, at the core of their objective, was the intrinsic human desire to explore, to crest the horizon and, undaunted, step forth into the unknown. NASA approved the Speedmaster for its space missions because it was the best, most accurate timepiece they could find, and testing revealed that it needed no modification in order to remain functional under the duress of space flight. NASA was concerned with accuracy, durability and usability; they didn't care about Omega's history, they needed a tool that could accompany humans on a mission to the moon and help them get back safely. They exposed the Speedmaster to high and low temperatures, blasted it with vibrations, challenged it with g-force extremes and submitted it to high and low pressure. Through it all, the Speedmaster ticked on, proving that it could go where no watch had ever gone before. Today the Omega Speedmaster is often regarded by collectors and enthusiasts to be the single most important wristwatch ever made, if for no other reason than that it accompanied us on mankind’s greatest feat – touching down on and exploring a heavenly body. While most of the Omega Speedmasters in circulation haven’t left Earth’s atmosphere, we can all take a certain amount of pride in knowing that they could – and would continue to perform just as they would down here on the ground. When you stop and think about all that entails, that’s really saying something.