Classic Submariner

MonoMonday: classic

This week's Mono Monday Challenge is "classic".  If fate had taken a different path this Submariner watch might have been known as the "Rolex Dive-O-Graph Watch".  I don't know about you, but I rather suspect that the elegant style classic might have been somewhat less successful in those circumstances.

1953 saw the birth of two very significant style icons: the Rolex Submariner, and Ian Fleming’s James Bond 007.  It was not until 1964 that Mr Bond made his first outing onto the big screen, in Dr No; but when he did, Sean Connery was wearing a Rolex Submariner on his wrist.  The connection continued for some time until Omega eventually began supplying the Bond watch in later years.  Even Seiko got in on the action when the watches gained significance as potential gadgets for Q.

Fleming's books describe Bond's watch as a "Rolex Oyster Perpetual", which makes it a little difficult to track down exactly which model it was that Fleming really had in mind.  Fleming probably wasn't helped by the fact that it took some time for Rolex themselves to settle on a name for their diving watch.  Early examples of the watch did not include the name “Submariner” on the dial, which probably explains Fleming's use of the term "Rolex Oyster Perpetual" instead.  Rolex flirted with a number of possible names for the Submariner including Deepsea, Frogman, Diver, Deep-Sea Diver, Skin Diver, Swimproof and, yes (whisper it) the Dive-O-Graph. Fortunately for posterity the name Submariner stuck in the end....