Counting to one hundred

Confession time.

Do you know what the thing is I struggle most with in road rally? 

It's counting to 100.

To be more specific, it's counting in hundredths of a minute that's the problem. After a lifetime of knowing that there are sixty seconds in a minute, having to think that there is another way to count a minute is very difficult, especially at the end of a rally after a five or six hours of hard concentration on driving. 

So, for those who read this blog but don't road rally, here's my latest acquisition. A hundredths reading stopwatch. 

If you're anything like me it looks weird the first time. A one hundredth of a minute is six tenths of a second. If you're counting in hundredths and the time to a checkpoint reads 2.33 minutes that's not two minutes 33 seconds that's really two minutes 20 seconds, a whole 13 seconds difference! That piles on the penalty points for sure. So you can see the need to be accurate and totally unconfused by your timekeeping. 

The stopwatch in the picture is reading 0.84 minutes, which in normal time is 50.4 seconds. 

My stopwatch acquired from a member of the Minnesota Road Rally fraternity is a Galco.  It was made in Switzerland by the Gallet company. Although Gallet are unknown to most, they are the worlds oldest watchmaker, their history can be traced back to Humberto Gallet who became a citizen of Geneva 1466, and began making timepieces there. From the 20th century onwards they have become noted for military chronographs and timepieces. President Harry S. Truman even wore a Gallet watch during his presidency. Gallet chronographs were supplied to members of the US Military in Operation Desert Storm. The Galco name on my timepiece indicates the watch was assembled in the USA, probably by the Excelsior Park company, a subsidiary of Gallet, who themselves had the highest reputation as a producer of sports related chronographs. Mechanisms for the watches were made at the home factory in Switzerland and shipped to the factory in Chicago to be placed in the cases that were specially tailored for the American market. The Excelsior Park company went out of business when the sports timekeeping world went digital. Gallet however goes from strength to strength. It's a fascinating history that I have only skimmed in researching this blog entry.

In these days of digital timepieces it's refreshing to listen to the relaxing tikka-tikka-tikka of a quality clockwork timepiece.