Wilbur Watch Co. Introduces the LEO, an Area 51 Inspired Watch with a Unique Jumping Hour Display

Here at Worn & Wound, we’re all pretty big fans of watches that approach time telling in an unusual way. In our collections you’ll find regulators, watches with offset dials and movements exposed from the front, watches with no numerals or indices at all, and you might even catch a d.m.h jump hour if you spend enough time on our Instagram feeds. The watch we’re looking at today, the LEO by Wilbur Watch Co., actually feels like an evolution of the d.m.h format – it’s a jumping hour mechanism that’s highly complex, but yields a surprisingly intuitive method for reading the time. And it comes in a big, bold package, partially inspired by a fascination with stories of extraterrestrials coming out of Roswell, NM and Area 51. So, you know, just a normal, everyday kind of watch. 

At the heart of the LEO is what the brand refers to as the Engine One movement, an automatic, Swiss made caliber, designed by Wilbur Watch Co. Time is told via two discs on either side of the dial, one transparent sapphire, the other aluminum. The discs are each marked with symbols that look like hieroglyphics, which is part of the alien inspiration for the piece. Those symbols are designed to fit together to form numerals, though, as the discs rotate. The hour is read at the dead center of the dial, outlined with a bright blue ring, where the two rings meet. The minutes are read via a rotating ring at the outside of the dial (an arrow right below the hour indicator points to the current minute), and there’s a running seconds indicator at what would normally be the 12:00 position. The movement is basically totally exposed from the dial side, but having the hour indicator at the watch’s central point, and the minutes on a bright blue disc, help to make this one of the more intuitive alternative time telling methods I’ve seen. 

As you’d probably expect, the case matches the dial’s aesthetic tone. It’s a big, bruising design, constructed from titanium but made up 8 modular pieces. It has a slightly oblong shape, measuring 48.5mm from 9:00 to 3:00, and 46mm from 12:00 to 6:00 (it’s 16.5mm thick). It comes mounted to an integrated silicone strap that helps give the whole package a futuristic, sporty vibe. 

The LEO, on the one hand, seems wildly impractical at its stated dimensions. And this is obviously an aesthetic that is tough to integrate into an everyday style for most people. But that, as with so many independently made watches that border on the experimental, mechanical art side of the spectrum, is where the charm is. The LEO is probably not an everyday watch, it’s a watch for curious and adventurous watch lovers to pull out of the box when they feel like conjuring a particular mood, maybe after an X-Files binge. It’s certainly fun, and you can tell that brand founder Jason Wilbur is indulging some whims here, but it’s also a legitimate technical and manufacturing feat, using a variety of materials in a novel, but ultimately coherent, way.

The LEO is available to order right now through the Wilbur Watch Co. website. The retail price is $32,500, and it’s a limited edition of 50 pieces. Wilbur Watch Co.