Unless you're a deeply geeky watch aficionado, a frequent patron of Barney's or a protesting student during the French labor strikes of the mid-1970s, then you've probably never heard of Lip. Time to get educated. Thirty-five years ago the European watch manufacturer pioneered some of the geekiest tech and most innovative design ever found in a timepiece. But all was not to be well for Lip. A volatile political and labor climate in France shattered the 141-year-old company and led to it being closed for nearly 15 years.

After numerous false starts, Lip was jump-started back to existence in the 1990s. Since then the watchmaker has enjoyed a quiet resurgence by returning to its nerdy roots and hiring back many of the original designers of these timepieces. These reissued watches are both technically and physically identical to their DeGaul administration-era counterparts. Here are a few of our favorites.

Left: Originally conceived in 1973 by Roger Tallon, designer of the TGV high-speed train, the Lip 200 "Dark Master" set the design standard that all Lip watches would follow for the next 30 years.

Another watch invented by Roger Tallon in 1975, the Lip Diode featured one of the first digital displays ever found on a timepiece.

A fairly radical departure from conventional design, the Baschmakoff Jump Hour was the 1972 brainchild of Prince Francois Baschmakoff, an illustrator and package designer hired by Lip. The jump hour displays concentric discs, and thin oblong cases have trickled into the design departments of many other watchmakers including Nixon, Diesel and Fossil.

Sure looks like it came straight outta the '70s, doesn't it? Wrong! The Lip Mythic is a new timepiece released in 2008. Don't worry though — it was inspired partially from another watch Tallon designed in 1972.

Also dreamt up by Tallon, the Fridge watch is designed to echo appliances (specifically refrigerators and iceboxes) that he grew up with in the 1930s.

Despite an ominous moniker, the Lip Mach 2000 "Mafia" was designed in 1973 as a more svelte counterpart to the Dark Master.

Noon on a well-made, properly paced sundial is whenever the sun is highest right there. The advent of mechanical timekeeping in the Middle Ages didn't change that. Noon in your town was whenever the sun was highest right there. If that meant that noon in a town a hundred miles away might be a few minutes ahead or behind your local noon, big deal. You couldn't get there fast enough for it to matter.

The railroad changed that, starting in the early 19th century. The horse had been the fastest way to move people and goods from one place to another since the species was domesticated, as early as 4000 B.C. The six-millennium reign ended quickly as networks of rails spread across North America and Europe at mid-century.

But timekeeping was still medieval. Local jewelers synchronized their customers' watches to local solar noon. In a small town with one jeweler, everyone might use the same time settings. In a large city, the many jewelers' various observations might diverge by several minutes. Some places achieved citywide synchronization by dropping a time ball on a highly visible tower at noon every day. (It worked better than ringing a bell. You might hear a great bell two or three miles away, but that would be 10 or 15 seconds after it was struck.)

Thousands of municipalities each worked to their local times. The Chicago Tribune, for instance, showed 27 local times in Michigan, 38 in Wisconsin, 27 in Illinois and 23 in Indiana.

Railroad timetables used about a hundred different standards. A single railroad that traveled east to west would use multiple noons: The Union Pacific, for example, had six different settings in what are today the Central and Mountain zones. The Union Station that served multiple railroads in a big city might have five or six different clocks, one for each railroad in the station, each running on is own time.

As new technology let railroad trains go even faster, the need for a better system was increasingly evident. The multiplicity of local time settings also created complexity and confusion for operators and users of the telegraph (whose lines usually followed the rails) and the newfangled telephone.

England, Scotland and Wales standardized to Greenwich Mean Time on Dec. 6, 1848, after two decades of urging by Sir John Herschel. In the United States, Charles F.Dowd, principal of Temple Grove Ladies' Seminary at Saratoga Springs, New York, pushed the case in 1869 for four time zones, each the width of 15 degrees of longitude. Professor Benjamin Pierce of Harvard picked up the cudgels in the 1870s.

The cause was also championed by William F. Allen, secretary of the General Time Convention, the group the railways had formed to coordinate their schedules. (That group evolved into Association of American Railroads.)

The railroads finally agreed to the General Time Convention on Oct. 11, 1883. They adopted five time zones: Intercolonial Time (now known as Atlantic Time in eastern Canada) and the Eastern, Central, Mountain and Pacific time zones. The U.S. zones were based on solar noon at 75, 90, 105 and 120 degrees west of Greenwich.

When the new system took effect at noon on Nov. 18, conductors all over the United States and Canada resynchronized their watches from their individual railroads' times to the new standard times. Some folks objected, thinking they were being robbed of minutes, just as people felt robbed of days when the calendar shifted from Julian to Gregorian in previous centuries.

But businesses followed the lead of the railroads, and people showed up for work when employers said they needed to, and customers visited stores when shopkeepers said they were open. And people arrived at the railroad station to catch trains that ran on the same time settings as the watches in their pockets and the clocks on the sidewalks.

So convenient was the system of time zones that it thrived entirely on the say-so of the railroads for 35 years. Congress did not enact Standard Time until March 19, 1918, when it also initiated Daylight Saving Time as an efficiency measure during World War I.

Source: FREMO (Friendship Association of European Model Railroaders)