SYNCHRONISED
One hundred years of the dive watch
When Kevin Casey was laying oil pipes on the seabed in the 1970s, the problem wasn’t the sharks or the stingrays, it was the eels.
‘Once, off the coast of Nigeria, I got to the end of a pipeline, which sat on a big half-shell guard,’ he tells me one day at the Diving Museum in Gosport, Hampshire, where he now works as director. ‘I look in the half shell, and there’s this huge eel sitting in it. All I can really make out is its mouth. I don’t want to go near it but with diving, if you’re the man on the job, you’ve got to get the job done, so I get the biggest crowbar we have, and I stand on the edge of the pipe and hit him in the head. He goes mad. There’s sand and silt everywhere. Eventually he turns back, but I had to wait till he leaves. And that’s when I saw how big he really was. If he’d got the liplock on me, I could’ve been a goner.’
Casey worked as an oil-industry diver for 40 years, and he was a Rolex man. Still is. The watch he’s wearing is the first stainless-steel bezel Sea-Dweller Rolex ever made, he says: they made it for him when he convinced them that chemical reactions underwater could cause corrosion in the old metal-alloy version. He gives it to me to hold for a moment. The patina is beautiful and it weighs heavy in the palm.
‘We were all Rolex guys in those days,’ he says. ‘There weren’t many of us. The watches were how you recognised other divers. Still are.’
Is there any other watch category with quite the appeal and mystique of the dive watch? It’s certainly one of the bestselling categories and, while there are no official figures, anecdotal evidence suggests it’s the most popular of all. Most brands make at least one, and they’re seen as key to reviving a business. Consider what the Seamaster Diver 300 has done for Omega since it became the Bond watch, or how the Black Bay boosted Tudor in 2012.
Of course, the success defies logic: their basic functions were long ago usurped by computers, and while they are marketed on the basis of their resistance at thousands of feet, the deepest any human has ever swum is 1,090ft (332m). There’s also the historical aspect. No other machine has ever featured such small, perfect cogs and dials, or been crammed with so much of the crazy, brave and sometimes rather dark spirit that underlies human exploration and endeavour on Earth.
This year, the watchmaker Blancpain celebrated seven decades of its Fifty Fathoms. Along with Rolex’s Submariner (1954), it’s often referred to as the first dive watch. But was it? If we take the dive watch’s USP as being able to surviv
