Few watches can claim to have not been designed for the purpose for which it ultimately became most famous. But when NASA proposed its first Moon landing, it hadn't planned for the utility of a watch in space — there wasn't, it figured, time to design one from scratch. So in 1962 it anonymously bought ten models from jewellers in Houston and started testing them. Four were knocked out of this race for the space wrist almost immediately. Two of each of the remaining six were requested and testing went on. The winner was the Omega Speedmaster. Its dial was legible under wildly variable light conditions, its chronograph pushers could be operated with space-suit gloves on, the screw-in case-back - designed by Claude Baillod to make it water resistant - just happened to ensure that it was also operational in a vacuum, at zero gravity and at the extreme temperatures on the Moon, anywhere between -160 and +120°C. It had Perspex glass, which meant it could not shatter - even the tiniest wayward fragment of glass being enough, potentially, to cripple the spacecraft. And it was manual wind - at a time when there was uncertainly whether an automatic movement would work in low gravity. Indeed, everything that had been considered to make the Speedmaster the most innovative watch for sports use just happened to make it right for space. In 1965 it became the first official space watch - ironically a version of the 1957 model designed ten months even before Sputnik became the first nan-made object to leave the planet - and, by turns, the first and only watch to be worn on the Moon, although not by Neil Armstrong. He left his in the capsule as a back-up should the Speedmaster fail 'outside. It didn't. And perhaps that might have been expected after all - the Speedmaster had actually been worn in space before by Walter Schirra. But that was unofficial. Now it was one of the most famous watches on the planet.