Vintage
Friends, You all know my fascination for early Vintage “Dive” Watches. I have put the dive in quotation marks due to these watches do not carry some of the typical trades of what is considered a dive watch today. Features like a turning diver’s bezel, screw-in crown, big luminous hands and markers.
Friends,
You all know my fascination for early Vintage “Dive” Watches.
I have put the dive in quotation marks due to these watches do not carry some of the typical trades of what is considered a dive watch today.
Features like a turning diver’s bezel, screw-in crown, big luminous hands and markers.
Some brands even used a manual movement even if that would put more wear on the water tightness of the crown.
We all know some of the pioneers in this area like Rolex, Panerai and Blancpain but in the 1950s when scuba diving grew more popular to the broader public there were many brands that wanted to offer a dive watch.
Many brands took one of their existing movements and built a “bigger” and stronger case around it to match water resistant requirements.
Bigger requires another pair of quotation marks because “bigger” in this case is between 35 to 37 millimeters.
But have in mind that during this time, mid-late 1950s to early 1960s most watches were 33-34 millimeters in diameter.
Some made an effort to design the watch to look more like a divers watch, others did not…
All this lead to watches that I choose as one of my collecting themes I choose to call - Early Vintage ”Dive” Watches!
I already posted photos on most of them here.
Eterna-matic, KonTiki
Eberhard & Co, Scafograf 100
Lemania, 920-62
Zenith S. 58
As you can see, today these look more like normal dress watches than divers…
One tell is that you may find these on an old Tropical rubber strap…
What most of these watches have in common is that they are the first attempt of a real divers watch from the brand!
Now my pursue of the Girard-Perregaux Deep Diver line have lead me to the first generation of the Deep Diver, reference 7254.
GP opted for a water resistance of 100 Fathoms, not sure if this was a tease toward BP who had their Fifty Fathoms model…
To read the full report of this watch, please come over to the GP forum and join us there!
Best
Blomman
Which is curious, because since 1953 the " modern " diving watches had this feature, inaugurated by Blancpain and Rolex. BUT they are marvellous examples. The Kontiki and the Eberhard, without forgetting the Zenith S 58. The GP is intriguing, indeed. I like it a lot, too. Nice post, my friend. Best, Nicolas
And due to that skipped the turning bezel... Or like JLC that had a non-turning bezel on their first diver, the Deep Sea Alarm...! Best, my friend Blomman
at least you had another way to measure the elapsed time via the alarm...
...in the early days. And dive watches were expensive, as much as the rest of the gear combined. It sounds stupidly dangerous but often dive timing back then was not done with a watch, but when your air started to run out. It got hard to breathe, so you pulled a lever on your tanks to release the last 500psi. In this atmosphere, I am not surprised that some early dive watches did not have rotating bezels....You just needed to remember what time you went under
Zodiac made the Seawolf and the Aerospace GMT in 100m "waterproof" snap-back cases through the late sixties, and then graduated to higher water resistance cases. Here's a first-generation Seawolf, not mine, from a user on the Vintage Zodiacs forum: ca. 1953 Zodiac Seawolf And here is my mid-60's Aerospace GMT in a similar case: Both of these are 35.5mm in diameter--a bit dainty for modern tastes, at least for a sporty watch with a rotating bezel. --Rick This message has been edited by rdenney on
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