Review: Patek Philippe 5975G

It’s not often that a very expensive, very limited luxury item actually ends up being useful, but for the Patek Phillippe 5975G, that just might be the case. Here are three reasons why this special edition 175th anniversary watch might just come in handy.

Telemeter

These days, we have the capability to retrieve pretty much whatever information we like from the internet. We can use lasers to measure things, satellites to tell us where to go and robots to let us know what the weather is going to be like. Let’s face it: we’re living in the future.

But the past wasn’t like the future, and the future will not always be like the present—if you catch my drift. Before electricity, and certainly before it was used to do more than just simple things like generating heat and light, stuff had to be done the hard way. Mentally, using slide rules—and in the case of the Patek Philippe 5975G, mechanically. It’s a set of skills that’s dying a death, alongside fixing a car and being able to spell.

For the 5975G, it’s a watch that can be viewed in two ways: either as an outdated piece of pre-computer memorabilia, or a useful tool that may actually still have a purpose to serve. Let me show you what I mean. The dial here looks like a mess of lines and numbers, but there are actually a series of calculators here that offer a surprising amount of computing power. They’re all based around a chronograph, and you’ll notice it’s been stripped of its sub-dials in order to give priority to what’s going on with the dial.

We’ll start with the outer scale, dubbed the telemeter. Sounds like a fancy word, but it’s literally just the Greek for “far away” and “measuring device” squished together, and that’s exactly what this is. Believe it or not, with just that scale and the chronograph, you can use the telemeter to figure out how far away something is.

There are some criteria for the thing you’re measuring, and that’s that it needs to do something that you can see and hear. You know when someone kicks a football in the distance, and you see them do it, then hear the kick moments after? That’s the phenomenon we’re recording here. It might not surprise you to learn that this was a function used for determining how far enemy artillery was in the World Wars, soldiers using the muzzle flash and crack to time the difference on their own telemeters.

It works with a scale that’s calibrated to the difference between the speed of light and the speed of sound. Start the chronograph when you see the light, stop it when you hear the sound and the scale will tell you how many kilometres away the object is. It’s simple, yet clever, offering a complex calculation of distance without actually having to go anywhere. Unfortunately, it can’t tell you if someone’s standing too close to you ...

Tachymeter

It’s at the centre of the dial of this Patek Philippe 5975G that we find our second computer, and this time it’s one that measures—well, whatever you want, really. Once again, were drawing from Greek here, “meter” still referring to measurement and “tachy” simply meaning swift. Basically, anything that happens repeatedly over time can be monitored with this function, and with more scope than you’d think.

It’s racing chronographs that have popularised the tachymeter, because something that’s easily calculated with a tachymeter is speed. It’s simple: once on the move, start the chronograph timer, complete a mile, stop the chronograph, and it’ll tell you how many miles you’ll do in an hour—or miles per hour, as it’s more commonly known. The 5975G is especially generous to slower vehicles as well, calibrated for three revolutions of the dial, or three minutes’ worth of travel time. So, if you take the full three minutes to travel a mile, you can see you’ve gone 20mph.

Most people get that. But here’s the bit people don’t get: this device is pretty much unlimited. Time your trip over one kilometre and you’ll get your speed in kilometres per hour instead. Time your trip over the length of one football field and you’ll get your speed in football fields per hour.

Perhaps it’s becoming clear: the tachymeter doesn’t measure miles per hour, kilometres per hour or even speed exclusively; it measures intervals. If you’ve got a tap dripping every minute or so, you can time between the drips and the tachymeter will tell you how many drips it will drip per hour. If you’re farming souls in Dark Souls 3 and you time how long it takes to gather 10,000, you’ll know how many souls you can get in an hour of farming.

Basically, it’s a things per hour device. If something keeps happening less than three minutes apart, and you want to know how many times that thing will happen in an hour, the tachymeter’s your guy. I have no doubt in my mind that there are many hours of fun to be had thinking of things in your home that can be calculated per hour.

Here are a few more examples to get you going: the number of times the fridge goes “click”, how often the neighbour bangs on the wall, the frequency a political entity Tweets nonsense, the amount of toilet paper you use in one sitting …

Pulsometer

I’ve saved the middle scale for last, because it’s actually something that really could save someone’s life. You don’t need to be a Greek linguist to work out what a pulsometer records, and that’s the pulse of a person’s heart. You can imagine before an age of medical machines how important a function like this was, especially in a time where every second is precious.

Like the other two computers here, the pulsometer is designed to calculate something between intervals in a way that saves critical time. For the telemeter, you don’t need to send someone out into a dangerous environment to actually measure distance; for the tachymeter, you don’t need to sit for an hour counting something; for the pulsometer, it will read a person’s pulse in beats per minute without needing the entire duration.

The operation is really very simple. Start the chronograph, count fifteen heartbeats, then stop the chronograph again. The scale will tell you how many beats that equates to per minute, the standard measure of heart rate, but without taking the whole minute to calculate. People’s heart rates can change for all sorts of reasons, some healthy, others not, and the pulsometer can quickly and easily get a measure on it.

Heaven forbid that the Patek Philippe 5975G ever needs to be used in a serious situation, but I think even when not in use, it can still serve a purpose. When a medical professional is against the clock, desperately trying to attend to an overwhelming number of patients, just knowing that the difference between fifteen seconds and a minute can have such an impact is an important reminder to value and respect the work these people are doing to keep us safe.

The pulsometer may be outdated, but the humans it was used by and for back then are no different to the ones giving and receiving medical attention now. If saving someone forty-five seconds really makes such an important difference, then the 5975G is a stark message not to waste those seconds, instilling a responsibility to our fellow humans to do what we can to help each and every one get used in the best way possible.

There are hours of entertainment to be had with the Patek Philippe 5975G. Whether you want to see how far your friend’s house is down the road without using Google maps, or you want to work out how many times the laugh track goes off in an episode of Friends, or even want to see what your heart rate gets to whilst watching a horror film, the 5975G has got your back. But whatever you do with it, make sure you stay safe and keep others safe too.

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