Friday 11 December 2020
The dive watch, by its very nature, is a blunt instrument. Developed in the 1950s as a means to track elapsed time underwater, its design brief was very simple: be accurate, legible and don’t leak. This led to a fairly standard form factor for subaquatic timepieces for the first two decades of their existence: white hands on a black dial, with a rotating timing ring.
Given this brutally straightforward spec, watch brands have been left with either a very easy, or a very difficult task when they set out to create a new dive watch: hew close to the archetype, or get creative and stand out from the crowd. By the late 1960s and into the 70s, dive watches got funky, with colorful dials and bulbous cases – but still, they had to perform their primary task.