Developed by Emile Gagnan and Jacques-Yves Cousteau, it was a system in which compressed air carried in back mounted cylinders was inhaled through a demand regulator and then exhaled into the water adjacent to the tank the introduction of a capable/specialised diver watch and of the SCUBA (Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus) were two monumental steps for opening up the exploration of the depths.įrom that point onwards most of the Swiss companies started to shift their attention towards the sea, trying to produce reliable underwater-capable wristwatches. In addition the first commercially successful scuba set, the Aqualung twin hose open-circuit unit was debuted during that same era. The watch had been developed by Jacques Fiechter, Blancpain CEO at the time and was refined by the addition of magnetic shielding following the French military specifications. Right after the war in France, Captain Robert ‘Bob’ Maloubier and Lieutenant Claude Riffaud, both of the French combat diving corps, started to search for a watch capable of withstanding their military diving missions – and they were thus instrumental in helping Blancpain introduce the legendary Fifty Fathoms in 1953. Actually they were Rolex 3646’s with a special dials made by Panerai, worn by the elite Decima Flottiglia MAS. The first ever specialised diving watches were the Panerai, used by the Italian frogmen in the Second World War. Either in war or for recreational diving, whether in spearfishing or servicing oil rigs in the North Sea, the diving watch has been a timekeeping apparatus of utmost importance to the life of the diver in question. The history of the diving watch is intimately coupled, right from the start, with the human attempts to master and understand life underwater. A diver’s chronograph watch to be more precise – the Omega Seamaster Automatic 120m Chronograph a.k.a. This is Monochrome, so we are going to investigate a very unique instrument which is strictly mechanical: a watch. No, it is not a big dive computer with a huge lcd screen that performs countless calculations per milisecond based on complex algorithms.
The operator in question is a diver, submerging in a hostile environment either to make a living, or to hunt fish. In this article we will examine an instrument that is so important that the life of its operator depends on it.
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