This text was initially printed within the January/February 2022 Subject of the WatchTime print journal.
For a lot of collectors, the historical past of the dive watch begins in 1953 with the introduction of the Blancpain Fifty Fathoms and Rolex Submariner. Divers, nonetheless, already needed to depend on water resistant watches, a long time earlier than the commercialization of two of the class’s most iconic fashions. We take a deep dive into how the historical past of underwater exploration and the evolution of the wristwatch are linked.
In 1942, German commerce publication Uhrmacher-Woche (Watchmaker’s Week) started an in depth article about water resistant watches with the next opening paragraph: “15 years in the past, when the water-proof watch hit the market, many anticipated it to be an promoting gimmick or a style fad, as a result of it isn’t actually essential to put on a watch when swimming.” The creator then shortly went on to conclude that “the event of the air-tight watch turned a technical necessity and essential for the result of the struggle, as a result of in rooms with lead storage batteries, in factories, on board submarines the air is stuffed with acid fumes.”
From the Pocket to the Wrist and Into the Waters of WWII
What makes this text from 80 years in the past outstanding is the mix of a number of misconceptions concerning the growth of the waterproof or water resistant wristwatch that in the end culminated within the invention of the dive watch. First, Rolex clearly did handle to create an influence “15 years in the past” by inserting its well-known full-page commercial on the entrance of London’s Day by day Mail on Nov. 24, 1927, proclaiming the success of the primary waterproof wristwatch and chronicling “the debut of the Rolex Oyster and its triumphant march worldwide” after then-26-year-old British skilled swimmer Mercedes Gleitze swam the English Channel sporting a Rolex Oyster, thus spending greater than 10 hours within the chilly waters between France and Nice Britain. Second, not a single phrase mentions divers or diving, although helmet diving had already grow to be a longtime trade by then. Different fields of utility appeared far more essential than diving or “swimming,” which sarcastically was additionally the case with lots of the improvements that helped set up diving itself. It was, for instance, the thought for a smoke helmet by Charles Deane in 1823 that led to the event of the primary profitable diving helmet (which consequently resulted in Augustus Siebe, an engineer and former watchmaker, engaged on a helmet fitted to a full size watertight canvas diving go well with in 1830). The identical was true of the oxygen rebreather, which was as a lot meant to be an emergency escape equipment for submarine crews, mine employees or firefighters, because it lastly allowed helmet divers to work extra independently with out surface-supplied air through a diver’s umbilical.
Sarcastically, these early helmet divers got here up with a fairly pragmatic technique to understand how a lot time they’d already spent underwater: the primary dive watches had been merely common pocketwatches, mounted on the within of a diving helmet. One cause for this answer: again then, the “bracelet watch” was “regarded upon by People as roughly of a joke,” based on the New York Instances from July 9, 1916. However, just like the German Uhrmacher-Woche, the paper additionally concluded in the identical article that “the phone and sign service, which play essential components in trendy warfare, have made the sporting of watches by troopers compulsory.” Taking a look at these early discipline watches, sporting one underwater, over a thick dive go well with and thus fully uncovered to each water, stress and potential bumps would have been a lot riskier (and costlier) than merely mounting a pocket watch on the (hopefully) dry within a helmet.
Two years after the New York Instances piece on trench watches, on June 11, 1918, New York based mostly “producers of excessive class specialties for Waltham watches” Jacques Depollier & Son was granted a patent within the U.S. for a “waterproof and dust-proof watch.” In an advert from the identical yr, Depollier additionally got here to an analogous conclusion because the New York Instances. “With the final use of wrist watches for troopers, sailors, aviators and others engaged within the open, the demand for waterproof watches has grow to be far more insistent, and the truth that the demand nonetheless exists unhappy is a sign {that a} dependable waterproof watch has not till now been produced.” Depollier’s “D-D” discipline and marine watch was geared up with a double clinched bezel that promised to maintain out “water, mud and fuel.” Once more, Depollier, just like the New York Instances, didn’t point out the diver as its meant audience, although their watch “could be fully submerged in water” and was marketed utilizing an image of it being positioned in a fish bowl.
Rolex, alternatively, introduced out its first try at a water-proof and dustproof watch, the Submarine, in 1922. It turned out to be an impractical design, based on Rolex, for the reason that watch was “counting on a second outer case to guard the primary watch physique. The outer shell needed to be opened day by day in an effort to wind the watch, thereby additionally weakening the metallic gasket that sealed the opening.” 4 years later, two main technical improvements of the corporate had made the single-case wristwatch watertight: a screw-down again and bezel, in addition to a newly patented winding crown, which could possibly be screwed right down to seal the case. Rolex marketed the Oyster because the “marvel watch.” Mercedes Gleitze supplied the proof (and likewise turned the model’s first testimonial).
Like Rolex earlier than, Omega got here up with an analogous concept of a double-case building for a watch that was focused specifically at “sportifs, marins et coloniaux” (athletes, sailors and troopers). In 1932, the “élégante” Omega Marine utilized a patented case sealed with cork to “hold water and the weather away from the guts of the watch.” The oblong watch even featured an adjustable clasp and was examined in Lake Geneva at a depth of 73 meters (later performed laboratory checks discovered the watch to be waterproof to a depth of 135 meters).
A New Kind of Watch, Strong Sufficient to be Worn Underwater
In 1935, the paths of the watch trade and underwater operations lastly turned absolutely intertwined, when the director of G. Panerai e Figlio in Florence, Giuseppe Panerai, was approached by the Italian Navy to develop a water resistant compass and a look ahead to operators of its newly developed manned torpedo. Whereas Panerai had already been a provider of particular navy tools, the corporate had by no means produced wristwatches. On Oct. 24, 1935, Rolex due to this fact despatched Panerai a Ref. 2533 with a big 9k gold cushion case for checks, the exact same watch that ought to later evolve into the Radiomir, utilized by Italian particular forces (and later by the Germans after having seized a few of these watches through the German occupation of Italy that lasted till Could 2, 1945).
Whereas members of the Decima Flottiglia MAS commando frogman unit had been initially geared up with Panerai-supplied Rolex watches, the American Underwater Demolition Groups (UDT), predecessors of the U.S. Navy’s present SEAL groups, had been geared up with “canteen watches” from the likes of Hamilton and Elgin (that includes a screw-on cowl for the crown that was held in place with a small chain). Just like the watches provided by Panerai, these considerably smaller canteen watches weren’t geared up with a bezel, however merely indicated time with their luminous arms.
For the rotating bezel, clearly the visually most distinctive component on a dive watch, the watch trade first regarded to the sky. On July 31, 1929, Philip Van Horn Weems utilized for a patent for a “technique of and equipment for navigator’s time protecting” utilizing a rotating bezel. The patent was granted in 1935 and shortly discovered its means on to many pilots’ watches, crucial one being the legendary Weems watch from Longines. It might take a couple of extra years till the watch trade started to acknowledge the potential for its diving buyer. Extra exactly, with the rise of autonomous diving, based mostly on open-circuit, compressed-air gadgets, like Yves Le Prieur’s invention from 1925, and, extra importantly, Émile Gagnan’s and Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s regulator that was first patented in 1943 (and mass produced by La Spirotechnique after the struggle), the Self-Contained Underwater Respiration Equipment (SCUBA) revolutionized diving, and consequently elevated demand for a dependable underwater timing system.
Blancpain began within the early Fifties with the event and testing of the model’s first wristwatch meant completely for divers. The Fifty Fathoms (a reference to the depth ranking of 300 ft or 91.4 meters) was the brainchild of Jean-Jacques Fiechter, then CEO of Blancpain, who additionally occurred to be an avid diver. In an interview performed in 2018, Fiechter recalled that he was diving off the coast of France when he misplaced observe of time and ended up working out of air, prompting an instantaneous ascent to the floor with out stopping for decompression, and thus leaving him on the danger of the bends. His answer, and in the end Blancpain’s “first trendy dive watch,” was commercialized in 1953 and got here with a brand new positioning for the caseback and crown gasket that might higher shield the case and motion from water, leading to a patent for each designs. Extra importantly, Fiechter had additionally launched a unidirectional bezel with the Fifty Fathoms that might permit the watch’s wearer to higher observe how a lot time was spent submerged. In brief, Blancpain had each improved the waterproof case and added a bezel that was completely aimed toward protecting observe of time spent underwater.
Rolex, alternatively, already had carried out a bezel on a watch with the Zerographe and was now engaged on probably the most waterresistant watch case of that point with an experimental watch, the Deep-Sea Particular, which was hooked up to the outside of Piccard’s Trieste throughout its first deep-sea trials down to three,150 meters (10,245 ft) off the island of Ponza in 1953 (Jacques Piccard himself was seen sporting a Longines Chronograph 13ZN when diving outdoors the submarine). In 1960, Don Walsh, Jacques Piccard and one other Rolex watch would attain the underside of the Mariana Trench (10,916 meters, 35,814 ft). Nearly simultaneous with testing the Deep-Sea Particular, the corporate launched the Submariner in 1953, a diving watch geared up with a rotating bezel. In 1954, the watch trade’s commerce publication Europa Star first mentions the Submariner briefly as a watch that “has been specifically designed for deep-sea diving,” and just like the Rolex Flip-O-Graph, the Submariner “carries a Time Recorder bezel,” which “permits the consumption of air in impartial diving tools to be simply managed.” In response to Europa Star, the Submariner was “examined on 132 sea trials within the Mediterranean and declared a to be a necessary accent to diving tools.”
Whereas Blancpain and Rolex have outlined the look and performance of the fashionable dive watch, each had approached the issue from the identical angle: a sturdy, extremely water resistant wristwatch geared up with a bezel that might be capable of stand up to exterior stress. What they didn’t think about: the rise of saturation diving, first within the army discipline, then in industrial utility. Dr. George F. Bond, a U.S. Navy scientist, had launched the idea of saturation diving within the late Fifties. Earlier experiments had proven that divers had been capable of reside and work underwater for days or perhaps weeks at a time earlier than making a single, comparatively quick decompression interval. Bond’s work isn’t solely credited as the start of saturation diving, but in addition marked the beginning of america Navy’s Man-in-the-Sea Program. From 1964, a trio of saturation diving experiments that allow divers work and reside in undersea habitats (Sealab) was launched and supported by america Navy Experimental Diving Unit (NEDU). With the ill-fated Sealab III, the habitat was lowered to 610 ft (190 m) off San Clemente Island, California, on Feb. 15, 1969, a depth that might carry a standard-issue Submariner already close to its limits. However it wasn’t simply the depth that posed new challenges; helium brought on the weakest half on among the watches, the crystal, to pop off throughout decompression. And this wasn’t simply occurring to the divers within the Navy. In 1968, Japanese watchmaker Seiko acquired a letter from a saturation diver from Kure Metropolis, in Hiroshima prefecture. In that letter, the diver additionally complained that the dive watches from Seiko misplaced their crystals throughout decompression. Whereas some divers merely unscrewed the crown earlier than compression, Rolex wished to supply a special answer for its 1967-introduced Sea-Dweller dive watch. From an advert from 1974: “The Rolex Sea Dweller, nonetheless, is fitted with a patented fuel escape valve.” Rolex had utilized for a patent for this valve on Nov. 6, 1967. “In impact, which means that the watch decompresses with the diver,” defined T. Walker Lloyd, then an oceanographic guide for Rolex in the identical advert. The Sea Dweller then went on to grow to be customary tools of the Compagnie maritime d’expertises (COMEX) staff (and changing the earlier partnership between Omega and COMEX).
A Diver’s Device
Omega and Seiko, nonetheless, selected a really totally different strategy to fixing the helium downside: as a substitute of enhancing an current watch, they each went again to the drafting board. One outcome was the Seamaster 600 “PloProf” (Plongeur Professionel) from 1970 that was constructed to be extra strong than some other watch from the corporate earlier than. From an advert from that interval: “We additionally put the 600 via our helium check. Helium, having a lot smaller molecules, can penetrate the place water can’t. So if a watch is proof in opposition to helium, it’s proof in opposition to nearly all the pieces else. This check confirmed that the 600 is 100 occasions as air- and water-tight because the Apollo spacecraft.” One other advert from Omega defined the three main improvements like this: “we carved the Seamaster out of 1 block of stainless-steel; no joints behind. Then we gave it a heavy, hardened mineral glass, which truly screws in. We gave it a turning elapsed-time bezel, which has its personal lock to stop unintentional transferring. We gave it an extra-safe, twin-locking crown.” Seiko, too, went with a monobloc case building for its 1975-introduced skilled dive watch, the 6159-7010 with a assured water resistance of 600 meters (a watch that was, just like the PloProf, in truth far more water-proof than this). The Seiko, nonetheless, took seven years to develop and resulted in 20 patents. The 6159-7010 was additionally inbuilt a means that it might stand up to the stress variations with out having to depend on an extra opening within the case, however got here with a protecting shroud, considering the heavy underwater work of its prospects. Then again, each the Seiko and the Omega got here with a design, measurement and value that prevented it from being worn by a big group of shoppers, whereas the Sea-Dweller regarded far more like a daily watch each underwater and onshore.
All three fashions additionally undoubtedly helped enhance the standard of dive watches considerably. In 1966, the British Sub-Aqua Membership (BSAC) had arrange an investigation committee for diving tools, together with dive watches, which again then had been deemed not solely “a significant half” of the diver’s tools, however apparently additionally probably the most troublesome. In 1968, BSAC member Geoff Harwood concluded that “the vast majority of the complaints and allegations of defective tools and unsatisfactory dealings with producers and distributors have been involved with diving watches” — which led to the choice “to hold out a survey in an effort to decide the extent of the issue.” Harwood’s conclusion was not as encouraging because the trade might need hoped for, “since so few of every make are represented, we can’t draw a conclusion as to ‘finest purchase’ or to undoubtedly not suggest a sure watch.” And added, “[E]ven in case you purchase an internationally well-known watch costing over £50 you continue to stand a good probability of discovering it stuffed with water once you come to begin your decompression schedule after a deep dive.”
Or, as Robert R. Springer wrote in his Pores and skin & Scuba Diver’s Digest of 1975, “At one time an oddity, at the moment, specifically constructed waterproof and pressure-resistant watches have grow to be one thing of a standing image among the many socalled lovely folks — although most of them by no means attain depths larger than the underside of a martini glass. The training scuba diver, nonetheless, wants a useful merchandise, fairly than a powerful one. And, in in search of an underwater watch, it pays to be extremely selective.”
Changing into an Ambassador of the Sea
In 1983, whereas the watch trade was slowly beginning to recuperate from its worst disaster to this point, the Orca Edge hit the market as the primary commercially viable dive laptop. Watch manufacturers at the moment largely centered on making dive watches extra water-proof (the IWC Ocean 2000 from 1984, for instance, was the primary serially produced dive watch water-proof to 2,000 meters), and multi-function quartz watches and dive computer systems shortly began to scale back the mechanical dive watch first to the position of a backup instrument, then largely a standing image, as noticed by Springer in 1975. In 1990, Seiko launched the “world’s first computerized diver’s watch,” geared up with a water sensor and depth sensor that displayed diving time and depth. 5 years earlier than, Citizen had launched the primary Aqualand and likewise the primary quartz watch to include an digital, digital depth gauge. Regardless of the existence of a extra versatile (and infrequently cheaper) possibility, dive watches have grow to be probably the most profitable classes for luxurious watch producers in recent times. The Submariner from Rolex, for instance, ranks on positions 2 and 5 on Chrono24’s hottest record from 2020. Even at Breitling, a model historically synonymous with pilots’ watches, the Superocean dive watch has grow to be the model’s hottest watch class. It’s arduous to think about Tudor’s current rise to fame with out the 2016-introduced Black Bay dive watch, or Rado’s success amongst watch collectors and fanatics with out the re-introduced Captain Cook dinner from 2017. Even Seiko has based mostly most of its current international success on the Prospex dive watch assortment. And Panerai, the previous provider of the Italian Navy, was resurrected in 1993 completely as a watch model. Final however not least, since 1995, Omega has been equipping the world’s most well-known spy with a Seamaster dive watch, and by doing so has created probably the most recognizable luxurious watches of the trade.
However maybe extra importantly, dive watches have grow to be an envoy for the significance of the oceans. Blancpain, for instance, turned a pressure in defending the biodiversity of the oceans. The 2014-founded Blancpain Ocean Dedication initiative (BOC) is a novel program within the watch trade that has already helped quite a lot of environmental initiatives get off the bottom (a few of them already underway earlier than BOC was launched). Oris, too, believes “passionately in conservation and is dedicated to appearing sustainably” and has launched a number of restricted version watches that help numerous conservation efforts. Others, like Luminox, Breitling and Ulysse Nardin, have began to advertise upcycling strategies with their releases.
From a high quality and efficiency perspective, at the moment’s mechanical dive watches are higher than they’ve ever been. They’ve reached the deepest components of the ocean repeatedly and supply any type of extra function one might dream of. In recent times, they’ve grow to be an emblem of sustainability and preservation, and supply a nostalgic look again at how man conquered the deep on the similar time. In different phrases, the dive watch has stood the check of time and confirmed that an analog product can coexist with a digital various.
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