Michael Caine wears a Traser Black Storm Pro

Michael Caine plays Alfred Pennyworth across Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, and in The Dark Knight he gets its best-known speech. Bruce Wayne keeps hunting for the Joker's motive, and Alfred answers with a story. Years earlier, in Burma, he had hunted a bandit who was robbing caravans of their precious stones and then throwing the gems away, until a local child turned up playing with a ruby the size of a tangerine. Some men, Alfred says, just want to watch the world burn. Caine delivers it like a man recalling something he actually saw.

The watch Caine wears as Alfred is a Traser H3 Black Storm Pro, a Swiss tool watch built around tritium, which is what the H3 in the name refers to. Instead of luminous paint that you charge under a lamp and that fades within the hour, the maker mb-microtec seals tiny tritium gas tubes into the hands and markers, and they glow on their own for years, with no light source and no battery. It is a soldier's watch, supplied to militaries including the US Army and the Swiss Air Force, and plain enough to read at a glance in the dark. Caine took to it: he began wearing the Black Storm Pro regularly during the trilogy and kept it on as his own watch, one among the many that made an unlikely collector of him.