Don't miss the next drop
Turn this Omega Seamaster 166.010 over and you find what Omega calls a seahorse. The drawing is something stranger: half horse and half fish. That is the hippocampus of Greek myth, and Omega found it in Venice. Jean-Pierre Borle, the company engraver who also drew the observatory on the back of the Constellation, noticed the metal hippocampi fixed to the sides of the city’s gondolas, where they were meant to protect the gondolier and his passengers. He made the creature the Seamaster’s emblem. On this watch it fills the caseback medallion, the first thing to find when you reach the photos of the back.
The dial makes a different kind of claim. Below the Omega logo it reads Automatic, Chronometer, Officially Certified, and those last words were not Omega’s to hand out. A movement earned them at one of Switzerland’s official testing bureaus, independent offices in watch towns such as Biel and Le Locle. There it was timed in several positions and at different temperatures, and only a movement that stayed within set limits was certified. Omega could build the watch; an outside office decided whether the dial was allowed to say so.
The silver dial keeps to essentials: applied baton markers, pointed hands, and the date in a framed window at three. It has toned unevenly, with fine mottling across the surface and a darker irregular patch below the center, and the close-up photos show both.
The steel case measures 35mm across and 43mm between the lug tips. Its bezel is smooth, the lugs are curved, and a raised crystal gives the side view a soft dome. Inside the caseback the metal is named in French, ACIER INOXYDABLE, beside the reference 166.010. The watch wears a steel multirow bracelet that closes with an Omega-signed folding clasp. We like it this way: the rows of steel carry the case’s metal right around the wrist, so a 35mm watch has more presence than its numbers suggest.
The signed, fluted crown has one more job. Inside is Omega’s caliber 564, from the automatic family the company introduced at the end of the 1950s. Its first date versions, the 560 to 562, changed the date only at midnight, so correcting it meant turning the hands through midnight once for every day you were behind. In the second half of the 1960s the 563, 564 and 565 added a quickset: pull the crown out, push it back in, and the date moves forward one day. The 564 was the chronometer of the three. So the morning after a 30-day month, when the window reads 31, the fix takes a second. Pull, push, and it reads 1.
