blomman Mr Blue
38586
Early Vintage ”Dive” Watches
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
This message has been edited by blomman on 2016-02-22 01:05:39
Available on the marketplace
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Early Vintage ”Dive” Watches
The common point of all of those you showed is that they don't have a bezel.
I guess many were in a hurry to create a divers watch....
Yes, that was a surprising feature on the JLC DSA, but...
Diving was very primitive...
Also the Zodiac Seawolf, which first appeared in 1953 as a response to Malubier's specification.
Reasonably. But it may have been 1954 before the first ones appeared on shelves.