SPOILER ALERT!

Rolex

The Hans Wilsdorf Foundation, a charitable organization founded by its namesake in 1944, owns Rolex SA — has been reported as “the conglomerate that owns all of the interconnected firms that make up the Rolex brand” and included Tudor [Bernardo].

The Morgan Stanley Swiss Watch Industry Report estimated Rolex earnings at 10.1 billion Swiss francs (U.S. 11.1 billion) with 1,240,000 units sold in 2023 [Loreto].

History of the enterprise has been traced back to 1905, when “Wilsdorf and Davis” was founded by partners Hans Wilsdorf (1881-1960) and Alfred James Davis, and commenced trading in London [Dowling & Hess].

Ian Fleming himself was first to attach the name “Rolex” by way of a James Bond diver’s watch — on page 111 of his original typed manuscript for Live and Let Die, completed by the end of February, 1953 [Randall]. That was three months too early for it to have been the Submariner famously introduced that year at the Basel Spring Watch Fair [Skeet and Urul], and almost two months too early for any supposed disclosure of some pre-release or prototype to have been made to him by beta-tester Jacques Cousteau [Lycett].

But even the best arguments that its real-world connection was to some “other” sort of diving model are still in agreement that that first 007 wristwatch application was mission-critically reliant upon fundamental Rolex performance history.

Select Horology

At the outset, the business of Wisdorf and Davis was “one of simply importing movements from Jean Aegler’s ebauche factory in the Rebberg, Bienne [Switzerland], and cases and dials from other Swiss suppliers [Dowling & Hess].

The watches would then be tested for performance by English watchmakers … before being cased and shipped to their customers …. The watches were unsigned on the dials, allowing the retailer to place his own name there. On the movement was the simple mark W&D, which was also repeated on the inside of the case back, standing, of course, for Wilsdorf and Davis ….

Reading an account of the recent Boer War, Wilsdorf came across a mention of the advantages of wristwatches in combat. At once, Hans saw a small niche in the market and decided to exploit it. He would specialize in wristwatches. Most of the major watch companies already made some but they were regarded as a passing fancy, not something serious or lasting ….

As authors James Dowling and Jeffrey Hess have recorded, “the word ‘Rolex’ was first registered in Chaux de Fonds, Switzerland on July 2, 1908 and four years later in London on July 6, 1912 …. The invention of a brand name for the product allowed the partners to differentiate their product from all others.” They went on to note that “the depths of anti-German feeling in Britain” led to a name change, “The Rolex Watch Company Ltd,” on November 15, 1915.

Between 1912 and 1990, Rolex took out over five hundred patents; “Wilsdorf’s first recorded patent in Britain was for a new way of luminescing watch dials and was obtained on 19th September 1917.” World War I, then, re-cast wristwatches from positioning as mere adornment, lacking in accuracy, to a necessity for leading large groups of soldiers who needed to “act simultaneously …. [One] of the things about warfare is that people care a great deal about function and not very much about form.”

Circa 1919, Rolex acted to strengthen its ties with its movement supplier — which up to that time had “had the strong hand” in that relationship. Through a mutual exchange of stock, the Rolex Watch Company came to have three shareholders: Hans Wilsdorf, Alfred Davis, and Hermann Aegler. At the same time, the name of its counterpart in the deal changed its name to become “Aegler, Société Anonyme, Fabrique des Montres Rolex & Gruen Guild A.”

A key outcome of this came in 1927 with a patent for what would become the Rolex “Prince,” which “proved to be one of the most accurate wristwatches made to date” [Dowling & Hess; Cleves]. Aegler “manufactured for both Rolex and Gruen, including a Gruen watch that is nearly identical to the Prince [Dowling & Hess] ….

… Rolex was given the ‘franchise’ for the British Empire and Europe, and Gruen was given the ‘franchise’ for the United States. These were the only markets anywhere in the world worth selling an expensive watch to.

Some three-and-a-half decades later, of course, Gruen and Rolex overlap importantly as the first two James Bond movie wristwatches in Dr No: Gruen as personal, dress watch; Rolex, as mission-deployed watch.

The year 1927 was also a turning point for the industry as a whole, when Rolex “arranged for the English swimmer Mercedes Gleitze to cross the English Channel wearing its newest watch, the Oyster, around her neck to draw attention to the model’s pioneering water resistance” [Gomelsky].

‘This was when watch marketing took on a whole new dimension,’ said Aurel Bacs …. ‘Until then, a wristwatch was praised as the most elegant, the most precise, maybe the cheapest.’

Rolex didn’t stop there. In May 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa mountaineer, became the first people to summit Mount Everest; both were equipped with Rolexes.

The Explorer model the company introduced after the ascent … owes its longevity in part to the brand’s commitment to advertising.

The Explorer would also become the model of choice for author Ian Fleming as he acquired his personal Rolex wristwatch [Deaton, WatchTime]. That timekeeper was produced during the fourth quarter of 1960. Earlier that year, the Rolex “Deep Sea Special” was strapped to the exterior of the U.S. Navy bathyscaphe Trieste for its 11,000-meter dive to the Mariana Trench.

En Route to 007

Watchmaker Rolex was first named in connection with the fictional James Bond character in the second Ian Fleming story, Live and Let Die (1954). That was the first time that the author differentiated a “mission watch,” which in that case was a professional diver.

Seven years later, a very particularized “solid gold Rolex Oyster Perpetual Chronometer on a flexible gold bracelet” was described onto the wrist of Colonel Giuseppe Petacchi in Thunderball (1961). That, then, became a James Bond watch when 007 put it onto his own wrist after having taken it off the wrist of the then-dead SPECTRE operative.

Double-0 Watch Status

When EON Productions went into pre-production on its first film in 1961, the thought and investment was in a plot adapted from the ninth and then-most-recently-published Thunderball [a]. A reference Rolex 6538 Submariner was choice for that mission watch — a model happened to be the personal timekeeper of producer Albert R Broccoli as well [a-b]. When script development suddenly switched focus to Dr No (1958), the diver’s watch designation was simply grandfathered into the screenplay [c].

Observations

The connection between Rolex wristwatches and James Bond was featured significantly in The Rolex Magazine Issue #06, in which the Submariner line was a primary focus [Widmer]. In fact, this was its opening for discussion of mainstream cultural influence.

The year of the Submariner’s birth, 1953, also saw the publication of the first novel depicting the adventures and exploits of a certain Bond, James Bond. In his books, British author Ian Fleming deliberately equipped his secret agent with a Rolex watch. It was, in fact, Fleming’s own chosen watch ….

In working to lay out the history of its Submariner line, the piece emphasized that, “when Bond first appeared on screen in 1962, played by Sean Connery, he sported a Rolex in the film” — sans any more specifically identifying characteristics, let alone reference number.

Its only labeling of a James Bond Rolex as “the iconic timepiece” was exclusively reserved for the Submariner 5513 that appeared, “for example, in Live and Let Die (1973) …” — a movie in which Rolex was conspicuously acknowledged as a product placement partner. A 1966 advertisement [Playboy] to promote the reference 5513 was also the only vintage creative to appear full-page in Rolex Magazine Issue #06.

Insights

Over the years, I’ve been “informed” by more than one respected source that “Gruen was essentially Rolex, akin to Tudor.” Sometimes more forcefully, à la, “Dodge has never been anything other than Chrysler.” A couple of NAWCC Lifetime Members (twenty years my senior) talked over lunch at the 2022 National in Dayton, Ohio, about the Rolex cum Gruen building used for administration in the 1960s by way of substantiation.

But neither that, nor shared Prince tech, nor Aegler, made the two, one.

And I say that as the lone wolf who’s made the case that the Live and Let Die (1954) “Rolex” label was meant to describe the pre-Radiomir Panerai diver that Ian Fleming had actually had in mind at the time of his writing.

Ironically, the single “casino-to-combat” prerequisite that made the idea of James Bond having worn just one wristwatch throughout that novel became reality during a quarter-century of EON Productions appearances. The Dr No (1962) Submariner was pure tool watch; the On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) Sub followed the Playboy “perfectly” print ad; then, finally, Licence to Kill (1989) positioned a Submariner Date as a most appropriate luxury accessory to morning wear — without compromise to mission its role in mission support on and under the waves.

Notes

  1. See “Insights” on “Rolex 6538 Submariner” page.
  2. Numerous photographs exist of Cubby Broccoli wearing different Rolex sports watch models during his tenure as James Bond film producer. See for example Thunderballs website.
  3. The Rolex Milguass would arguably have been a more relevant designation.

Related Page

  • James Bond Watches Blog: “Rolex“

— Dell Deaton
Updated: January 7, 2025
January 8, 2024

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