When Blancpain launched the Fifty Fathoms dive watch in 1953, it transformed the watchmaking industry. “It pretty much delivered the blueprint to any other dive watch that has come since then,” says Roger Ruegger, a passionate diver and dive watch expert who is editor-in-chief of WatchTime magazine. “It’s essentially the mother of all dive watches. Before that, we had water-resistant watches that were used for diving. And after, we had dive watches.”
Jacques Cousteau patented his scuba system in 1943. But early scuba diving was a dangerous sport, with few of the safety devices 21st-Century divers take for granted. Perhaps most dangerously, systems had no pressure gauge, meaning divers had to estimate how much air they had left based on their intuition of their depth, time spent and breathing rate. Too long at depth and/or too rapid an ascent could easily lead to decompression sickness, a condition popularly known as the bends, where expanding gases bubble through the body causing symptoms from rashes and joint pain to paralysis and death.
During those early days, Jean-Jacques Fiechter, then CEO of Blancpain, lost track of time while diving off the coast of France, ran out of air and had to race to the surface, an accident that could easily have killed him.
“Being the head of a watch company, and having almost had a catastrophic dive accident, he started to think about what he could do to create an instrument that could help divers be more safe and enjoy diving more,” Ruegger says. “And that’s how he came up with a watch that was called the Fifty Fathoms.”
Fiechter was not, of course, working in a vacuum. Waterproof wristwatches had begun to emerge during World War I, as officers demanded dustproof, waterproof and shatterproof timepieces to coordinate attacks. And other watchmakers were developing dive watches. Yet what distinguished the Fifty Fathoms from conventional waterproof watches and defined it as a dive watch was the unidirectional bezel, which allowed divers to set a point marking the moment they had descended underwater and so accurately track time spent.
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