Into the blue
A new tribute to James Cameron’s record descent into the Mariana Trench is a hugely over-engineered triumph
On 30 September at the Hoyt Building in New York, a Rolex fell under the Antiquorum auctioneer’s gavel, fetching a cool $33,750 over the high estimate of $150,000. Any casual observer of auction trends will just assume this was yet another steel Paul Newman dial Rolex Daytona. But they’d be wrong. It was in fact one of the earliest known examples of the Ref 1665 Sea-Dweller, which once belonged to famed filmmaker and oceanographer Philippe Cousteau – son of a certain Jacques.
The Sea-Dweller is undeniably one of the most important diving watches ever designed – a professional update of the immortal and ubiquitous Submariner, launched in 1954 in response to the era’s burgeoning craze for SCUBA. Yet despite this, Rolex’s inherent collectability, and this particular piece’s provenance, it is still remarkable that a ‘tool watch’ should command telephone-number hammer prices.
Truth is, the diving watch is that unusual thing: a typically unfulfilled exercise of engineering that serves as a powerful status symbol. Much as a supercar will never top 200mph unless you’re Jenson Button on a McLaren press junket, you’ll never take your Sea-Dweller down to 610m, let alone make use of its helium escape valve – unless you persuade its first protagonist, the elite industrial dive unit COMEX to loan you a pressurised bathyscaphe and force the helium atoms through the case that way.
Alternatively, you could try persuading James Cameron, who took time out of his Hollywood directing duties in 2012 to pilot a submergible of his own, the Deepsea Challenger, to the deepest point on Earth: the Mariana Trench in the Pacific. All the way down to a record-breaking 10,908m, in fact, where the only light is lent by the bioluminescence of the strange creatures that can survive in this environment.
In Cameron’s own words, “I felt like, literally in the space of one day, I had gone to another planet and come back.”
He remained on the ocean floor for three hours, taking samples that have led to the identification of at least 68 new species and capturing high-resolution images that have been used in National Geographic’s new 3D film Deepsea Challenge.
No human had returned to this point since Jaques Piccard’s pioneering descent on 23 January 1960 in the bathyscaphe Trieste. During both historic dives, an experimental Rolex watch was attached to the robotic arms and hull of the respective submersibles, both exposed to the most colossal water pressure – over one tonne per square centimetre, or the equivalent of six SUVs pressing down on about one square inch of sapphire crystal.
Such extreme feats of engineering demand commemoration, and to the instant delight of watch enthusiasts, this August saw the release of a new blue-dial version of Rolex’s DeepSea – an even more hardcore version of the Sea-Dweller, good all the way down to 3,900m. The deep blue to pitch-black colour gradient of its ‘D-blue’ dial is truly beguiling, set off sharply by ‘DEEPSEA’ picked out in the same lurid green as Cameron’s craft.
But why even bother to build a civilian timepiece good to 3,900m, when COMEX have barely managed it to 500m in a hyperbaric suit? As Jason Heaton, an editor on Gear Patrol and an experienced SCUBA diver, observes, the real-world appeal of these bathyscaphes for the wrist boils down to the old adage of ‘because we can’:
“Let’s face it: dive watches are simple creatures and the specs of the original ones from the ’50s would still do fine today,” he concedes. “But watchmakers are tinkerers, hence the absurd depth ratings of the DeepSea or Hublot’s Oceanographic 4,000 metres for example – 100 metres would suffice for 99 per cent of recreational divers (if they even wore a watch).
“But again,” Heaton counters, “it’s a differentiator and a talking point at the water cooler on Monday morning. Wearing one to the office hints at a more interesting life beyond the cubicle, whether imaginary or real.”
It also helps when the diving watch in question looks as smart as this one.
The Rolex DeepSea Sea-Dweller D-blue (£6,900) is now available from Rolex London at One Hyde Park, thewatchgallery.com