Cover Rolex’s Oyster Story exhibition in Shanghai, marking a hundred years of the case with the centenary Oyster Perpetual and the Testimonees who have worn it since (Photo: courtesy of Rolex)
Rolex’s Oyster Story exhibition in Shanghai, marking a hundred years of the case with the centenary Oyster Perpetual and the Testimonees who have worn it since (Photo: courtesy of Rolex)
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As Rolex marks a hundred years of the Oyster, a case that has barely changed since its inception, Tatler looks back at the watch that made waterproofing a feat worth testing in oceans, on mountains and on the wrists of the people who pushed it there
Most watch cases are redesigned every decade or so; refined, restyled, occasionally abandoned when fashion moves on. The Oyster case has spent a hundred years resisting that cycle. Patented in 1926, it has been copied across the industry, tested at the bottom of the ocean and worn through every shift in taste that watchmaking has produced since. During all that time, the basic engineering behind it has never required a rethink.
Tatler headed to Rolex’s centenary exhibition, Oyster Story, which showed at Shanghai’s West Bund Dome in June, to celebrate this functional achievement.
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Above British swimmer Mercedes Gleitze (right) features among the 100 legendary Rolex wearers celebrated in the Oyster Story exhibition in Shanghai (Photo: courtesy of Rolex)
British swimmer Mercedes Gleitze (right) features among the 100 legendary Rolex wearers celebrated in the Oyster Story exhibition in Shanghai (Photo: courtesy of Rolex)
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In 1914, Rolex founder Hans Wilsdorf wrote to his business partner, Hermann Aegler, with a line that now reads like a founding manifesto rather than a technical memo: “Dust is our greatest enemy.” He had already begun experimenting with ways to seal the edge of a watch crystal, treating the dust problem more seriously than anyone in watchmaking had previously. By 1922, Wilsdorf ’s conviction had hardware behind it. The Submarine suspended a movement inside a second outer case, its bezel topped with a crystal screwed against the case middle, a working solution to a problem nobody else had thought worth solving.
Four years later, the idea found its final form, and the Oyster case was patented, its bezel, caseback and winding crown all screwed down against the case middle. The world had its first genuinely waterproof wristwatch. The case itself has barely changed since 1926. What changed was everything Rolex made it prove.
In 1931, the Perpetual rotor arrived, a self-winding mechanism that let the watch run on the energy of the wearer’s own movement. The Oyster became the Oyster Perpetual, a name that has appeared on the dial of Rolex’s core collection ever since.
Proof, for Wilsdorf, was never theoretical. In 1927, Mercedes Gleitze swam the English Channel wearing an Oyster on her wrist, the watch’s first public trial and the start of Rolex’s habit of handing prototypes to people doing dangerous things. The pattern repeated for decades: Alfred Gregory wore an Oyster Perpetual on the 1953 British expedition that put Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay on the summit of Everest, a climb that gave Rolex’s Explorer its name and its reason for existing. Seven years later, Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh strapped an experimental Rolex Deep Sea Special to the outside hull of a self-propelled submersible and descended nearly 11km into the Mariana Trench, the deepest point in any of Earth’s oceans. The watch survived pressure that would have crushed almost anything built before it.
Rolex made it a mission to solve practical problems. The crown system introduced and patented in 1953 protected the watch from water, dust and moisture through two separate sealed zones—one inside the crown and another inside the crown tube. The Submariner, launched that year for working divers rather than collectors, was among the first to carry it, and the feature has since become standard across Rolex’s professional and classic lines, each timepiece now waterproof to at least 100 metres.
Above Inside the exhibition (Photo: courtesy of Rolex)
Inside the exhibition (Photo: courtesy of Rolex)
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In 1967, to deal with ever- increasingly deep dives, Rolex patented the helium escape valve, enabling trapped gases in the watch to be released as a diver heads towards the surface and decompresses. Four decades later, in 2008, the Ringlock system pushed depth resistance to 3,900 metres, roughly seven Eiffel Towers stacked end to end, thanks to a three-layer case of domed sapphire crystal, a compression ring and a titanium alloy back.
The watches that have become hype objects were never designed as such. The Submariner was a tool for professional divers. The Daytona, slow to sell when it launched in the 1960s, became the watch to covet after Paul Newman received one as a gift from his wife; then, decades later, starting in the 1990s, it would become the timepiece of choice for Leonardo DiCaprio to wear on red carpets, turning a stopwatch for racing drivers into the most quietly fought-over chronograph in the secondary market. The GMT-Master was built for Pan Am pilots crossing time zones before that was a common inconvenience for the rest of us. None of these watches were created to be desired but rather to work; desire followed because the work was visible.
The Shanghai exhibition made this history tangible rather than just nostalgic. One pavilion was dedicated to Rolex’s optical atomic clock, a device the brand built to set the standard for precision against which its own mechanical watches are tested. It uses lasers to measure atoms, which is a far more exact way of measuring time than any spring and gear ever could be, and shows how far Rolex has gone to keep proving its own claims of accuracy. Upstairs, 100 portraits of people who have worn the Oyster over the decades line the gallery walls, a reminder that the watch became a legend only because so many people chose to wear it through moments that mattered.
Above A vintage Rolex on display (Photo: courtesy of Rolex)
A vintage Rolex on display (Photo: courtesy of Rolex)
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This year’s centenary watch, a new Oyster Perpetual 41 in yellow Rolesor with a slate dial inscribed with “100 years” at six o’clock and the number 100 in relief on the crown, is a way to mark the anniversary. But the point was made a century earlier, by a German watchmaker convinced that dust and water were enemies worth defeating properly, and that proof, once made, does not need to be made again. It only needs to be tested, repeatedly, by people willing to go somewhere the watch has yet to venture.
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As the Regional Editor for Watches and Jewellery and Editorial Content Lead for Tatler GMT, Amrita Katara specialises in luxury watch and jewellery coverage across Asia, with expertise in editorial strategy, feature writing and interviews with industry leaders. Her past roles span luxury lifestyle media and client partnerships. Based in Mumbai, Amrita’s work bridges global trends and Asian market insights.
