Spending Time With The New Ollech & Wajs Early Bird EB-24
There are watches named after places, people, and the animals their designers admired on long-ago fishing trips. And then there is the Ollech & Wajs Early Bird, a watch named after a satellite. I liked this watch so much that I bought the re-edition.
I have a bit of a long-term fascination with the Swiss brand Ollech & Wajs. I’ve explored the history of its 1,000m-rated dive watch and reviewed a couple of examples of the company’s modern offerings. I am a big fan of the C-1000 A, the re-edition of the original from the 1960s. My colleague Mike has also spent time with the yellow-dial version. That C-1000 A and the watch we are looking at today may just be the brand’s strongest releases to date.
The backstory to the Ollech & Wajs Early Bird is an interesting one. It was inspired by a US satellite. The satellite, Intelsat I, was a piece of Cold War-era space hardware that most people have never heard of, and its four years in geosynchronous orbit quietly rewired how the world talked to itself. To understand the Early Bird on the wrist, it helps to understand the Early Bird in the sky.
Image: Analog:Shift
A satellite, a war, and a watch
In April 1965, Hughes Space and Communications Company put Intelsat I, nicknamed “Early Bird,” into geosynchronous orbit roughly 22,300 miles above the equator. It was the first commercial satellite ever to achieve that feat, and for the better part of four years it carried the transatlantic telephone calls, television broadcasts, and fax transmissions that had previously crawled across the ocean floor by cable.
Image: Ollech & Wajs
It was Early Bird that beamed the splashdown of Gemini 6A into American living rooms that December. It was also Early Bird that, by the time of its decommissioning, had carried the world’s television feed of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Ollech & Wajs, a Zurich brand founded in 1956 by Albert Wajs and Joseph Ollech and known even then for building watches more interested in surviving abuse than looking pretty doing it, noticed.
The 24-hour bezel
It was a strange, brilliant little tool watch. Like the Glycine Airman, the Early Bird had a 24-hour dial, the kind favored by militaries and anyone else who found “is that AM or PM?” an unacceptable question. As a result, its hour hand completed a single revolution per day rather than two, a quiet echo of the satellite’s 24-hour orbit. Housed in a 38mm case rated to 200 meters and running FHF caliber 72, hand-wound with 17 jewels, it was legible and tough.
Ollech & Wajs paired that dial with a bidirectional bezel split into blue and red. At a glance, it invites comparison to the Rolex GMT-Master “Pepsi.” The resemblance, however, is coincidental: the colors come straight from the Early Bird satellite’s livery, and the split runs from 12 AM to 12 PM rather than the GMT-Master’s day-and-night split at 6 AM and 6 PM. Once you recognize this, you’ll see it’s different enough in function to make it distinct.
Ordered by mail, sight unseen
Most original Early Birds were never sold in a shop window. Instead, they were ordered sight unseen from black-and-white classified ads in the Army Times and Stars and Stripes by American pilots and radio operators serving in Vietnam who wanted a 24-hour dial and got, as a bonus, a startlingly colorful bezel that the grainy newspaper ads hadn’t quite captured. According to estimates, Ollech & Wajs made no more than 500 pieces. The Early Bird is said to be Albert Wajs’s favorite watch among everything OW has produced. For a company with a catalog this deep, that’s saying something.
The modern reinterpretation
This year marks Ollech & Wajs’s 70th anniversary of making watches, and in digging through seven decades of archives for a heritage model worth reviving, the brand landed, unsurprisingly given whose favorite it apparently is, on the Early Bird, itself now past its 60th birthday. Trading today under the OW banner, still designed in Zurich and hand-assembled in the Swiss Jura, the company has brought the watch back and called it the Early Bird EB-24.
The dimensions have grown, albeit sensibly. With a 39.5mm diameter, a 48mm lug-to-lug, and a 12.5mm profile, the case sits closer to contemporary tool-watch proportions than the 38mm original without tipping into oversized-homage territory. The case isn’t a one-off, either. It’s also in OW’s existing line of pilot’s watches, the same architecture underpinning models like the M-52B AF. The water resistance has also increased from the original’s 200 meters to a properly serious 300 meters (30 atm). This is more than most owners will ever need, but it’s a reassuring number on a watch built for durability.
The movement
One of the biggest changes is under the dial. Whereas the vintage Early Bird relied on a manually wound FHF 72, the new EB-24 swaps in an automatic Soprod C125 in place of the P024 that powers the rest of the pilot line. The C125 is a genuine 24-hour movement, meaning the hour hand makes just one revolution per day rather than two. That’s a wonderful proposition rather than simply printing 24-hour numerals on a standard dial. The C125 also picks up a 42-hour power reserve (four hours longer than the P024’s 38), beats at 4 Hz, and is rated to ±7 seconds per day, with a bespoke rotor signed “OW Zurich 1956” under the solid steel case back.
Notably, there’s no date window, a deliberate omission that keeps the dial uninterrupted and, frankly, suits a watch this dial-forward. However, there is a ghost date position for the crown. The sapphire crystal gets an anti-glare treatment the original never had, and the dial furniture is finished in white Super-LumiNova. That means that while the vintage piece is legible, the modern one is legible in the dark. I can attest to the quality of the lume on this modern Early Bird. It’s the most impressive in the lume department of all the Ollech & Wajs watches I have experienced so far.
The verdict on the Early Bird EB-24
Ollech & Wajs has also, sensibly, left alone the details that make the Early Bird recognizable. The bicolor blue-and-red aluminum bezel is present and correct, still doing its bidirectional, dual-time-zone job, and the watch ships on a 20mm black Italian leather-and-linen strap with a thorn buckle signed “OWZ 1956.” An OW-engraved M-Link steel bracelet is also available as an extra. The bracelet shipped with my review watch, and it looks great, is comfortable, and has a high-quality clasp with a ratcheting extension. It uses pins, which I find more painful to change than screws, but your mileage may vary. The bracelet is comfortable but, as usual, I prefer this watch on a NATO.
Backed by a three-year warranty, the Early Bird EB-24 retails for CHF 1,956 (roughly £1,825), a deliberate nod to the brand’s 1956 founding. Ollech & Wajs even leaned further into this by launching the watch at 19:56 CEST. It’s a small, slightly cheeky flourish for a brand that otherwise takes its engineering more seriously than its marketing, and it lands the watch in a spot that’s genuinely competitive for a Swiss-made automatic with a movement this specified. I feel the price is fair for the design, history, specs, and overall quality.
Concluding thoughts
What the new Early Bird gets right is honoring the brand’s past while providing meaningful updates. It would have been easy to over-design this watch, to lean on the space-race backstory with a gimmick dial or a limited-edition sticker campaign. Ollech & Wajs has built a wonderful reimagining of the original Early Bird. I really like this watch; it exudes the quirky, bold design language of the 1960s. Honestly, this is a strong release from the brand, and I can recommend it to anyone looking for a watch with this particular 24-hour calibration.
The fit and finish of the Early Bird EB-24 are excellent too. Six decades after a satellite the size of a beach ball changed how the world talked to itself, the watch named after it is still worth listening to. As I stated earlier, this is a watch I liked so much, with the 24-hour sweep of the hour hand and the overall vibes that place it firmly in the 1960s (with modern updates), that I got one myself. What do you think, Fratelli? I love this release from Ollech & Wajs, but I’d like to read your thoughts in the comments section.
