Top of the Game

In its quest for excellence, Rolex has maintained the vision of its founder Hans Wilsdorf through the years

- Leslie A Levine

The wristwatch may be ubiquitous today, but it was not a common sight back in the early 20th century. Hans Wilsdorf precipitated a paradigm shift with Rolex by overcoming three fundamental challenges that wristwatches faced, and in so doing made them viable timekeeping instruments that replaced pocket watches as the timepiece of choice. His vision of producing the best wristwatches possible and continually improving on them is one that the brand maintains even today.

SETTING MILESTONES

The first challenge concerned precision and Rolex triumphed in 1914 with a wristwatch that was awarded a "Class A" precision certificate by England's Kew Observatory, then the highest authority for chronometric precision. This was followed in 1926 with the invention of the Oyster case with its patented system of a screw-down bezel, caseback and winding crown, which met the challenge of waterproofing. Finally, the year 1931 saw Rolex tackle the challenge of self-winding with its self-winding mechanism with a free rotor called "Perpetual"-the culmination of a series of patented ideas that would become the standard adopted by the entire watchmaking industry.

Of course, these were but three milestones in Rolex's history; other breakthroughs abound. When American test pilot Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947, he had a Rolex Oyster on his wrist. Similarly, the first recorded successful ascent of Mount Everest in 1953 had Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay both equipped by Rolex. More recently in 1960, Rolex's experimental Oyster, the Deep Sea Special was the first timepiece to reach the bottom of the Mariana Trench, which marks the deepest point on Earth. This was paralleled in 2012, when an experimental Rolex Deepsea Challenge watch was attached to the submersible that James Cameron used to descend to the same depths and later inspired the Oyster Perpetual Deepsea Challenge that was launched in 2022.