Terrasport II — Black Dial / Black Buffalo

The 12 on the Terrasport II dial is not a numeral. It is a luminous triangle with a dot on either side, the marker that lets a pilot orient a dial instantly in turbulence.

That convention, along with Arabic numerals 1 through 11 and luminous rectangular five-minute batons, is what makes the Terrasport II read the way it does. Mühle-Glashütte takes the design language from the pilot's watches Glashütte produced from the late 1930s, a heritage belonging to the town rather than to the company, whose own history began with precision measuring instruments. The hands are losange, Mühle's word for lancet hands that taper to a point, and a red central seconds hand answers a matching red marker at 12.

This is the black dial on black buffalo leather with a steel pin buckle, 20 mm at the lug and 66 grams complete. The brushed stainless steel case is 40.0 mm across and exactly 10.0 mm tall, with a 48.2 mm lug-to-lug. Anti-reflective sapphire, screw-down crown, date at 3 o'clock, and an exhibition caseback, since Mühle takes the view that a well-finished automatic is always worth looking at. The SW 200-1, Version Mühle runs 41 hours with the brand's patented woodpecker neck fine regulation. 10 bar.

Forty millimetres, ten millimetres tall, and about as legible as a three-hand watch gets.

Perfect for: pilot-style watch buyers, black leather strap automatics, high-legibility 40 mm watches.