Mechanical Watches: No Longer For Divers|Sailors
Mechanical watches were relied on for navigation for the last two hundred years. However with the increased use of GPS and quartz marine watches, they are no longer a necessity. Just as the sextant and astrolabe were displaced as navigation tools by the mechanical watch now the simple watch is taking a backseat to other inventions. But their legacy lives on in the popularity of chronometer wrist watches. These old tools have not been relegated to the museum because they are still valued as a connection to a bygone era and as fashion accessories.
Making of marine watches is still big business, and most of the luxury watch making brands have set aside a significant budget to develop their marine lines.
Paradoxically, many of their wearers are unlikely to be found on yacht decks, let alone at sea. It is now more of an image than a necessity. The appeal is strong even in parts of the world where sailing and other marine sports have a relatively short history. Men like a rugged watch along the same lines that have them buying more powerful cars and bikes than are needed.
Professional divers mostly wear very modern quartz watches that are very reliable and waterproof. But they still own older mechanical watches like a Rolex for personal use. They are simply to valuable to wear at work.
Ulysse Nardin is a brand that illustrates the transition from working chronometer to luxury wrist watch. So famous were its deck clocks for their reliability that its M.Gr.F. marine chronometers were formerly used by all the major navies of the world. It was not until the company’s 150th anniversary, in 1996, that Ulysse Nardin produced its first marine chronometer wrist watch. They work hard to keep the wrist watch true to the deck clocks design. The company may have been late to take the plunge into the leisure market, but it aims to set future trends. They are introducing the first marine watch designed exclusively for women..
Current trends among marine-themed watches include large, luminous, black-faced watches; gold sandwiched between rubber; carbon fiber details; and, perhaps inevitably in the modern luxury world, diamonds around the dial.
The Rolex Submariner is the standard and still going strong but they are uniformly worn by the fashion conscious not the working diver. The watch is too expensive to risk scratching of getting water damage.
That sort of anxiety never, apparently, worried role-model macho watch-wearers of the past. Take, for example, James Bond: in the Ian Fleming novels, the Royal Navy commander and spy was referred to several times as wearing a “Rolex Oyster Perpetual on an expanding metal bracelet” as he went about his elegantly brutal business.
In the real world as opposed to the reel world a Rolex or other luxury brand owner would surely change his watch from day to night.
