In watch-making, or horology, a California dial refers to a clock face that consists of half Roman (usually 10 o'clock to 2 o'clock) and half Arabic numerals (usually 4 o'clock to 8 o'clock). Sometimes the hours of 3, 6, and 9 are replaced with a dash instead of a numeral and an inverted triangle in place of the 12. The use of this dial style dates back to the 1930s, for example in early Rolexes, Marina Militare and Kampfschwimmer diver's watches. A number of Rolexes were refurbished by a company based in California using this style of dial, and resulting in the name "California dial".
Famous quotes containing the words california and/or dial:
“But why go to California for a text? She is the child of New England, bred at her own school and church.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)