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koimaster
- Founder
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- Joined: December 16th 2009, 11:00pm
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WHO MADE THE FIRST DIVE WATCH?
Get a bunch of watch nerds together in a room and ask them who made the first dive watch and you’re likely to hear a discordant harmony of “Rolex!” and “Blancpain!”
And those are certainly worthy choices. After all, the Submariner was introduced at the forerunner to Baselworld in 1954 – long before we were all watching a lethal combination of Sea Hunt and Jacques Cousteau. Further, if you look at the Sub’s marketing, not to mention its street cred as “the original tool watch,” you couldn’t be blamed for believing it was the first. And I mean, James Bond! HE wore one, albeit in the early 1960s.
However, a year before the Submariner made its debut, Blancpain introduced the Fifty Fathoms. They’d been working with the French Navy on a custom piece that would satisfy the needs of the underwater combat diver teams. And in fact, the FF (as it became known) was the first watch to feature a uni-directional rotating bezel with minute markings so those Navy frogmen could know the elapsed time of their dives.
https://www.everestbands.com/blogs/beze ... in-panerai
And those are certainly worthy choices. After all, the Submariner was introduced at the forerunner to Baselworld in 1954 – long before we were all watching a lethal combination of Sea Hunt and Jacques Cousteau. Further, if you look at the Sub’s marketing, not to mention its street cred as “the original tool watch,” you couldn’t be blamed for believing it was the first. And I mean, James Bond! HE wore one, albeit in the early 1960s.
However, a year before the Submariner made its debut, Blancpain introduced the Fifty Fathoms. They’d been working with the French Navy on a custom piece that would satisfy the needs of the underwater combat diver teams. And in fact, the FF (as it became known) was the first watch to feature a uni-directional rotating bezel with minute markings so those Navy frogmen could know the elapsed time of their dives.
https://www.everestbands.com/blogs/beze ... in-panerai
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