The Greatest Rolex Submariner Watches
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Nicholas Foulkes can highly recommend his new book.
“It’s worth it, even if you can’t read,” he says. “Even if you’re illiterate, it’s worth it. No command of the English language is necessary for the enjoyment of this book!
“I shouldn’t be saying that, as a writer.”
What Foulkes means is that, even if you got rid of all the words – which would be a shame – you’d still be left with something pretty great, on the basis of the pictures alone.
Oyster Perpetual Submariner: The Watch That Unlocked The Deep is a glossy, 255-page deep dive (oof!) into the history of Rolex’s most recognisable and popular watch.
With its clicky rotating bezel and then-groundbreaking water resistance of 100 meters it’s one very few watches that can be described as “iconic” with a straight face.
Ask a child to draw a men’s watch, and chances are they’ll draw something that looks like a Submariner.
Announced in 1953, the watch was immortalised in pop culture when Sean Connery wore producer Cubby Broccoli’s Submariner ref. 6538 to introduce James Bond to the cinema with 1962’s Dr. No – Rolex having declined lend the filmmakers a watch, in the days before product placement.
One of the first watches specifically designed for diving, Jacques Cousteau conspicuously wore a Submariner ref. 6205 throughout a career that brought otherworldly visions of the ocean floor into cinemas and homes for the first time.
There have been books about Rolex’s Submariner before, of course. And there have certainly been books about Rolex before.
Where …Submariner breaks ground isn’t in the pages of lush new photography, although there’s plenty of that, or the contributions of the brand’s various “testimonies”, Rolex insisted on those, it’s that is the first book ever to be sanctioned by The Crown.
Foulkes, a historian, author, expert and leading voice across luxury watch journalism for the last three decades, was given unprecedented access to Rolex’s archives in Geneva to research the work.
…Submariner is the first in a series which will tell the story of Rolex’s watch lines, one book at a time. (Next up: the Explorer).
This may not sound like any great shakes – access to archives, whoop whoop – but this is Rolex.
Despite being one the world’s most famous and recognisable brands, despite being one of its most successful and popular, despite sales that are said to now top $10 billion, it is famously secretive.
Its top leadership is largely unknown to the public. It keeps tight control over who can sell its watches. And because it is a private entity, owned by a trust established by its founder, it is not required to publish financial statements or provide any insight into its operations, like a publicly traded company.
This isn’t just Rolex being difficult. It’s also good for Rolex. Its secrecy only enhances its mystique and exclusivity.
There are more costly watches. There are rarer watches. There are watches with finer complications and more intricate movements and more esoteric brand positioning. But there is only one Rolex.
All of which makes …Submariner catnip to watch fans.
The hardcore will take particular pleasure in the publication of production numbers for each of the Submariner references. It will no longer be secret that there were 78,540 examples of ref. 126613, a steel and gold model launched in 2020, but only 6,663 of ref. 126618, an 18ct yellow gold model launched the same year, for example.
Honestly, people love this stuff!
“It was just a process of getting to know them, I mean it took years,” Foulkes says.
“I actually wrote something that turned out to be a bit of a test, an entire history of Rolex from the beginnings to the 21st Century, that was not published. There’s an entire manuscript lying somewhere. I think that might have given them the confidence to trust me with their story.”
A CV that includes the definitive history of Patek Philippe and authoritative horological texts like 2019’s Time Tamed, as well as social histories of everything from cigars to Bentley to costume balls probably helped.
“I mean, I’ve been doing this since the 1980s, so it’s been a long time coming, put it that way,” Foulkes says.
The idea to present the history one watch at a time, came from the brand.
“[CEO] Jean Frédéric Dufour had a much better idea – or a less conventional idea [than a straight biography] – to tell the story of Rolex through its famous models. From a personal point of view, I find that more interesting and certainly more challenging, because you’re building up a picture of a cultural institution, which is what Rolex is, from ten different points of view. It’s a bit like one of those Victorian novels where you have different narrators at different times, taking up the story.”
Still, you have to wonder why Rolex has chosen to do this now.
“Well, you can speculate,” says Foulkes, who finished the first draft of ...Submariner in 2021.
“The simple reason is that Jean Frédéric Dufour thought it was a good idea. The more complicated reason is that Rolex used to be one of those opaque states. It was like a castle whose walls could never be breached. I mean, the job of the press office there was to say ‘no’ in a variety of polite ways. So, for many, many years it gained this reputation for inscrutability. And I think today, the internet, and social media, has change the landscape.
“A lot of these stories that are put out there by people selling watches, auction houses, so-called experts – they’re sort of reverse engineered from looking at a watch and extrapolating some mystical history backwards or just outright getting it wrong, by saying that a watch was used by a CIA operate diving in Lake Baikal, or something like that – but actually the watch wasn’t introduced until two years after.
“So, there is this wealth of misinformation and I hope that this book goes some way to readdressing that.”
Some of the details are amusingly quaint.
“There was a film called The Deep [1977 underwater adventure starring Robert Shaw and Jacqueline Bisset] – a brilliant, brilliant film. A sort of Treasure Island yarn updated for the 1970s And there was a whole [promotional] campaign around The Deep. It’s quite exceptional. You learn about The Deep cocktails. It was all about telling Rolex retailers how to maximise the value of The Deep in selling watches.”
Also, that for all the glacial pace of product innovation – one year Rolex’s big release was a Submariner with 1mm added to its case, something that had the watch community reaching for the smelling salts – there’s the revelation that Rolex moves quickly when it wants to.
“The famous green Bezel for the 50th anniversary of the Submariner [in 2003] was an idea of then CEO Patrick Heiniger, who came into the workshops early in January of that year and said ‘I’d like to have a commemorative model to show to the general public by the Basel watch fair’, which was in March or April that year,” Foulkes says. “And in a very short space of time they put that together – and now it’s one of the most desirable watches in the world.”
Despite the cooperation of his subject, you get the sense that Foulkes wasn’t just handed an AAA backstage pass.
“They like to keep an eye on things, put it like that,” he says. “The in-house archivist is an amazing guy called Christoph – he has been absolutely brilliant, the photos they have in the archive [are incredible]. But I’m a bit like the last person you want in an archive, really because I’m always pulling things out saying ‘What’s this? What’s that?’”
“And there are still massive areas where there is just no information because of this culture of secrecy. So, then you have to piece it together from external sources. I reference everything from newspaper articles to memoirs of submariners and divers. And also bring in things that aren’t necessarily known, even by Rolex.”
And Foulkes is sanguine about the fact he hasn’t written the definitive Rolex book, but another one to add to the canon.
“People are going to go at this with a 100-strength magnifying glass,” he says. “They’re going to say, ‘Is it really true that this patent was done then?’ ‘Wasn’t it Joseph Mangle who developed that screw?’ I took care writing it, but it’s by no means an exhaustive technical text.
“I hope that it’s a pleasure, or at least not a chore, to read, and that it also has enough information to satisfy collectors. I do think it’s quite brave of Rolex to put this much information in the public domain.”
As we’re talking and he’s flicking through the book, though, there is one thing he wishes he’d thought of earlier.
“Where is that watch?” he keeps saying. “I can’t find it because there’s no index. This makes life very difficult. There’s a fucking index going in the next one…”
FOULKES’S FAVES
Rolex Submariner ref.1680/8 (1969)
“It’s the first yellow-gold one. I love that it’s got real 1970s louche glamour about it. This marks its transition from basic functional piece of diving equipment to something else. Because you don’t need a Rolex in gold to go diving. You don’t even really need a date function to go diving. You’re bothered about minutes and seconds rather than days of the month. This is where you see the development of the alter ego of the Rolex Submariner. Which is that it looks as good in a yacht club with a pink gin, as it does underwater. There was a famous ad which with a guy wearing black tie that said ‘We invented the Submariner to work perfectly 660 feet under the sea. It seems to work pretty well at any level’. They understood where things were going. Was it expensive at the time? Well, all watches are expensive now. I would say this wouldn't I, but for what you’re getting with a Rolex is more than just a great watch. It’s a brilliantly made, solid piece of engineering. I hate this idea of 'storytelling'… Because you’re not buying storytelling. You’re buying a piece of history. It’s real.”
Rolex Submariner Deepsea Challenge (2012)
“The Deepsea Challenge is a beast. It just shows that this is a company that can produce extraordinary things. [In 2012, the director James Cameron undertook a solo dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, piloting his Deepsea Challenger submersible to the depth of 35,787 feet. Rolex designed a watch to withstand the extreme pressure involved, strapping it to the external arm of the vessel. It survived.] I couldn’t wear that watch berceuse it would be like I was wearing… I don’t know… something very big on my wrist. But I would probably say the Deepsea Challenge is the one that epitomises [the brand’s connection to] modern exploits, with Cameron and all that. That’s a great story that’s told in the book at some length. Again, they put that together in a very short space of time. They weren’t intending to make that watch but they still had the capacity to make it. They had the designers and the scientists. It was a real down-to-the-wire moment. It was a matter of weeks that they bought this thing together. The industrial capacity of Rolex, that is quite fascinating. It can turn on a sixpence – or whatever one turns on – and yet it can also be very classic and slow-moving as well. The scale of it required different ways of treating different materials – so they would have to make the glass and test the glass at breakneck speed. And they did.”
Rolex Submariner ref. 116659SABR (2018)
“There was this period where you start to get quite funky stuff, where they do gem setting. This has a production quantity of 771. This is how great design, in my opinion, shows its mettle. Great design means you can stretch it. In this case stretching a watch that began life as a piece of diving equipment. These watches were [originally] considered far too bulky to wear in civilian life. But then it also becomes something else, when you interpret it in gemstones and precious metals. What’s interesting is that gem setting has become quite a significant thing in recent years. I’ve obviously been around the workshop a lot, and it’s always very impressive seeing this sort of work done at scale. But it’s still the same watch. The symbolic watch of the sea and diving.”
Rolex Submariner ref. 6204 (1953)
“The very first Submariner. It was all about the rotating bezel. Because, if you think about it, that’s what defines the GMT-Master and the Submariner. There was a watch that preceded the Submariner, that also had a rotating bezel, the Rolex Turn-O-Graph. [Announced in 1953, and initially aimed at pilots and other military personnel who needed to measure time intervals]. And this was supposed to be the watch that could do everything for you. It basically looked like a Submariner – but they said you could use it to calculate the rate of production of cigarettes in a factory, or something like that. I mean, bonkers stuff. And [in the end] it was the Submariner that really took off. One of the wonderful accidents of history is that something that is launched as a technical piece of equipment, [comparable to] a scuba tank or a diving mask suddenly becomes a cultural icon.”
Rolex Submariner ref. 5514 (1975)
“This is hugely significant. It’s the sort of thing that collectors go nuts over. [It was developed specifically for the Compagnie Maritime d’Expertises (Comex), a French company known for its diving systems]. In the Gulf of Mexico, there were oil producers who wanted to go out further and do deeper drilling. The ref. 5513 was a standard model, but the Comex versions come equipped with additional features. One was the inclusion of a helium escape valve, allowing helium to escape from the watch during decompression. The problem with helium molecules is that the watch explodes. So, the valve was created to meet that need.”
Rolex Submariner Deepsea Special No.1 (1953)
“This is the one from the Tyrrhenian Sea. I like it because it’s bicolour. It’s steel and gold – don’t ask me why! But it was made in ’53 and it went to a depth of 3150 meters. [Reads from book] 'Auguste Piccard and his son Jacques Piccard dived to a depth of over three kilometres with this version of the Deepsea Special attached to the side of the vessel'. This was this Rolex that looked like somebody had basically cut a golf ball in half and stuck it on. It is astonishing. They do come up for auction but there’s lots of them around, because they made some for exhibition and some were actually used.”
Rolex Submariner Deepsea ref. 136668LB (2024)
“To say it was unexpected is rather understating it. It was answering a question that nobody had even thought of. It’s just insane. [Earlier this year Rolex released an 18ct gold version of the Submariner, a heavy and expensive material not typically associated with going diving. Why did Rolex do that? Because Rolex can.] It’s totally unnecessary, and yet it’s in the portfolio of diving watches alongside the classic Subs.”
Rolex Submariner ref. 1680 (1966)
“The first Submariner with a date. I like the date because I’m not a scuba diver. I think it’s a great thing. But if I wanted the purest expression I’d go for the no-date. The production quantity was 111,226. And the Submariner 1680 in gold 5,765. So, now you we can see – there’s a lot more steel than gold out there.”
Oyster Perpetual Submariner: The Watch That Unlocked The Deep is published on October, priced £100 and available here
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