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THE ONCE AND FUTURE KINGPosted by madonna
By Wei Koh Some kind of commercial magic happens when an object created initially as a tool leaps across the rarefied threshold of our imaginations to become a luxury symbol. In the most successful instances, these objects retain the powerful primacy of purpose forged to serve real practical needs. Nowhere in horology is this purposefulness expressed more clearly than in Blancpain’s legendary dive watch, the Fifty Fathoms. The story of its invention has already become immutably meshed into the fabric of watch cognoscenti lore. 
Following World War II, one hero of Charles de Gaulle’s Free French Forces was tasked with the creation of les nageurs de combat — the first incarnation of the French naval commandos. Captain Robert “Bob” Maloubier emerged from the fracas of WWII a bona fide cult hero, thanks to his exploits. Maloubier, who is 88 years old, lives in the gentile town of Houilles, France, and likes to tell people he is a “retired accountant”, but can undoubtedly still hammer nails through a two-by-four with his forehead, would be a terrific subject of a biopic. He is in fact one of the last surviving members of Winston Churchill’s secret army, dubbed the Special Operations Executive, which was tasked with destroying the Axis powers from within. He was decorated with Britain’s Distinguished Service Order and awarded the rank of captain for parachuting into occupied France not once, but twice, to conduct guerilla operations such as blowing up bridges to impeded the German army’s advance and bombing a German naval vessel. Not content with this, following the war, Maloubier threw himself into the creation of the French Navy SEALs and immediately set about sourcing equipment for this elite unit. But the problem was, he simply could not find a waterproof dive watch that, from the perspective of visibility and clarity at depth, functionality related to the unique timing needs of a dive watch and overall resistance, was good enough for him. Captain Maloubier and his lieutenant Claude Riffaud subsequently approached the then-predominant French retailer and movement-maker Lip with a sketch for the ultimate dive watch and were told that it resembled a “clock for the wrist” and that it simply had “no future”. Undeterred by the shortsightedness of lesser men, the two French naval officers eventually chanced upon Jean-Jacques Fiechter, the CEO of a small Swiss watch brand named Blancpain. Fortunately, Fietchter was an early adopter of scuba and a passionate diver, and eagerly plunged into the project. What is important to note is that the original Fifty Fathoms was created by two men who had an astute understanding of the needs of a dive watch. Maloubier was quoted saying, “Blancpain agreed to develop our project, which envisioned a watch with a black dial, bold large numerals and clear markings: triangles, circles, squares; a rotatable exterior bezel which repeated the markings of the dial. We wanted at the start of a dive to be able to set the bezel opposite the large minute hand in order to mark the time. We wanted each of the markings to shine like a star for a shepherd.” Meanwhile, Fiechter also had a hand in developing some of the watch’s key features, such as the unidirectional rotating bezel. It is important to note that the very first Fifty Fathoms watches dating to 1953 already featured unidirectional rotating bezels which, from a purely functional perspective, made them far superior to the competing Rolex Submariner which would not receive this feature until 20 years later with the advent of the ref. 5513. Fiechter also insisted on a screw-on caseback for greater water resistance, an automatic movement to prevent premature wear to the waterproof crown, a double O-ring design for the crown that avoided infringing on Rolex’s screw-down crown patent, as well as a highly functional antimagnetic shield. The resulting watch, dubbed the Fifty Fathoms after the British measurement of 50 fathoms, or approximately 91.45 meters, which was at the time considered the maximum depth which a diver could achieve with the oxygen mixture then in use, would be the most groundbreaking, innovative, robust and functional dive watch ever created. Amusingly, the first retailer to carry the watch was the aforementioned Lip, which must have realized the error of its ways when faced with sheer heroic awesomeness of the resulting Blancpain timepiece. The Fifty Fathoms was also adopted by the Israeli, Spanish, German and US navies as their official diving watch. The US Navy watches are today particularly collectible as they were redialed as Torneck-Rayville watches. For the second half of the 20th century, the Fifty Fathoms remained the single most relied-upon military-specification diving tool watch and its iconography has left an indelible mark on military and civilian divers the world over. As a testament to its enduring appeal, the 2003 Fifty Fathoms 50th anniversary edition expresses a pure and totally clear genetic allegiance to its predecessor, so much so that even the modern watch, replete with a sapphire bezel, literally ripples with the daring heroism ingrained in the original by its creators. But in the last decade, the dive watch has begun a rapid evolution process that would result in three different paths. The first path is amusing in its excessiveness and looks at the addition of complications to dive watches. This includes everything from perpetual calendars, as in Ulysse Nardin’s Acqua Perpetual, to the riotous dive-watch tourbillons made by Roger Dubuis, Girard-Perregaux, Richard Mille, and yes, even Blancpain. If ever asked to curate a watch collection specifically for Fiat heir and international dandy Lapo Elkann, REVOLUTION would not hesitate to focus specifically on diving-watch tourbillons, which have the practical advantage of demonstrating — even when stripped down to your Vilebrequins — that you are inordinately and slightly irresponsibly rich and therefore highly eligible for immediate supermodel sex. The second path relates to the recent wars in depth-rating one-upmanship initiated by Girard-Perregaux’s Sea Hawk II Pro with its 3,000-meter rating, followed by Rolex’s Sea-Dweller DEEPSEA, which brought the depth-rating threshold to 3,900 meters; and now, this has been usurped by the Hublot King Power Diver with its crazy 4,000-meter depth rating. But the most interesting evolution relates to empowering the dive watch beyond its time-telling abilities. This began with a watch created in 1999 by IWC named the Deep One, the world’s first luxury dive watch with a mechanical depth gauge. It should be noted that as early as 1966, Favre-Leuba had toyed with depth-gauge-equipped models named Bathy, but these watches were marketed more for their novelty value rather than as serious dive watches. Conversely, Richard Habring, the designer of the IWC Deep One, was both incredibly serious about diving and serious about horology, having created IWC’s split-seconds chronograph mechanism as well as its tourbillon. His idea was to implement a Bourdon tube inside the watch. Seawater would enter this tube, causing geometric deformation as water pressure increased, which would then be translated dial-side into a reading as well as a resettable hand to show the maximum depth reached. An incredible act of pioneering horological daring, the Deep One was also a highly sensitive piece of equipment, so the intrusion of seawater to make it function was, in retrospect, less than ideal. In 2008, Jaeger-LeCoultre created a depth-gauge watch, the Master Compressor Diving Pro Geographic that featured a largely externalized depth gauge in the form of a blackened steel membrane that would deform in a linear manner as seawater compressed it — transforming this deformation into a reading for depth from zero to 80 meters. The same year also saw Favre-Leuba reenter the dive-watch depth-gauge stakes with a timepiece dubbed the Bathy V2 using a copper-beryllium membrane, which deforms with water pressure to provide a reading of depth. However, we have yet to see one of these watches on a consumer’s wrist. In 2009, IWC unveiled the Aquatimer Deep Two in honor of the Deep One’s 10th anniversary. This time, the watch featured a membrane that was external to the watch. Water enters through a crown and acts upon a spring-loaded sliding nail head, which activates a rack to provide a reading of depth from zero to 60 meters. But while all of these watches are admirable attempts to integrate useful technology into a mechanical dive watch, none of them are capable of aiding in what is probably the most important part of a dive — the decompression stops during resurfacing. When you dive, inert gases build up inside your body. To eliminate these gases during a dive, you need to stop at various depths — particularly critical within the last 15 meters of the dive for intervals usually regulated to five-minute periods. These stops allow the inert gases in the form of venous microbubbles to safely depart through your lungs. Without these stops, these bubbles of inert gas can damage body tissues or even block arterial flow. The problem with most dive watches is that they do not have a separate timing function to show these five-minute safety stops. Since the rotating bezel of a dive watch is set to show elapsed dive time, it cannot be reset to measure these intervals without compromising the overall dive timing. Further, because dive watches with depth gauges normally display the full depth scale over a single display, it is hard to read the exact depth to the meter with a great deal of visual clarity for these stops. Blancpain’s mighty X Fathoms addresses both of these issues absolutely. On the dial, on the same axis as the hour and minute hands, is a central seconds hand to provide an immediate sign that the watch is under power. Also centrally mounted on this pinion are two depth gauges, one for overall depth from zero to 90 meters, and a second all-important meter that uses a full 270 degrees to display the final zero to 15 meters critical for correct decompression. The watch also has a third depth-gauge hand mounted co-axially with the other two to show the maximum depth reached. This hand is easily reset using the pusher at eight o’clock. This pusher is protected from accidental activation by an oversized lever. Between 10 and 11 o’clock is a retrograde five-minute counter that is easily activated even with gloved hands, using the pusher at 10 o’clock. When you reach your decompression depth, simply press this to begin the countdown. The myriad information is given further visual distinction using different-colored luminous treatments. The scale from zero to 15 meters and the depth hand for this scale are treated in blue; the scale from zero to 90 meters and the matching hand are treated in orange; the five-minute countdown and the matching indicator are rendered in a combination of blue and orange; and finally, the hour, minute and seconds, as well as the elapsed-time scale on the unidirectional bezel, are all in green. The watch is powered by the automatic caliber 9918B (based on the caliber 1315), a three-barrel movement where the first two barrels feed power to the third so that its torque remains consistent over the five-day power reserve. But the major innovation in the X Fathoms relates to the use of amorphous metal to create the membrane for the depth gauge. This membrane actually surrounds the inner case, and as such, appears totally coherent with the overall structure of the watch. Water enters either from the vents in the caseback — cheekily shaped as the old “no radiation” symbol on vintage Fifty Fathoms watches — or through the caseband on either side of the crown. Water pressure deforms the membrane. This deformation is transformed using a rack-and-pinion mechanism into a depth reading that is accurate to 30cm. This is incidentally incredibly accurate, as most electronic gauges claim accuracy of no more than +/-20cm. In terms of materials innovation, the X Fathoms literally abounds with it. The bezel is in sapphire. Blancpain makes the only bezels in modern dive watches with elapsed-time markers executed in SuperLuminova, an incredibly practical feature. The case is made from Grade 5 titanium. The movement features a silicon hairspring to render it — as with the original Fifty Fathoms — impervious to the corruptive forces of magnetism. The balance wheel of the movement is also made from titanium to aid in antimagnetism and lengthening the power reserve. The depth-gauge membrane is made from a liquid metal alloy, featuring an atomic structure that is not crystalline but disordered. This creates a metal with incredible elasticity as well as memory. It has incredible resistance to permanent deformation, it is antimagnetic and it possesses high long-term stability. The fact that the membrane is less than 1mm thick and made to +/-2-micron tolerances, thus allowing a very high degree of accuracy, also deserves mention. Finally, the rack-and-pinion mechanism that controls the rise and fall of both depth-gauge hands is made by LIGA, a combination of photolithography and galvanic plating using nickel phosphorous. This technique creates parts that are accurate in tolerance down to the micron. The liquid metal alloy deforms in a non-linear fashion, so the rack and pinion teeth for the depth-gauge mechanism had to be specially designed to compensate for it, in order to display the depth in a linear fashion. In the same way that the original 1953 Fifty Fathoms created the fundamental blueprint of all dive watches that followed, the new X Fathoms writes an all-new chapter in the history of the mechanical dive watch, one where finally, a mechanical timepiece features all the timing aids, visual clarity, reliability and robustness needed in contemporary diving. And like the original Fifty Fathoms, the X Fathoms is a product of the imagination of an avid diver — Marc Hayek, the CEO of Blancpain. Hayek is atypical of a Swiss watch CEO. He is one of the most technically minded leaders in the industry, propelling his brand forward as a pioneer in the adoption of new materials technology; he is also something of a daredevil, having been Switzerland’s BMX national champion and also a highly proficient race driver as evident from his high placing in Lamborghini’s single-make Super Trofeo race series. He is also often found submerged in water, evidenced during the launch of the 2003 Fifty Fathoms 50th Anniversary watch where he descended at depth with Bob Maboulier to change the strap on this timepiece. It was his unique perspective as a diver that allowed this visionary timepiece to come into reality. He explains, “As a passionate diver, I wanted to create a mechanical watch that would serve all the needs of the diver in a totally intuitive way. The X Fathoms is a project that was not created from a commercial incentive, but really to express all our competences in the most ambitious diving watch ever created.” Says his mother Nayla Hayek, chair of the board of directors of Swatch Group, “What I like about this watch is that unlike many others which use the depth gauge as a gimmick, this watch was born out of the imagination of a passionate diver and made for other divers with total sincerity.” What is undoubtedly true is that with the X Fathoms, Marc Hayek has written not just the latest chapter in the evolution of the Fifty Fathoms, but also the most significant new chapter in the history of the modern dive watch. Blancpain X Fathoms Movement Caliber 9918B self-winding movement; 5-day power reserve Case 55.65mm; titanium; water resistant to 300m Strap Rubber See Blancpain X Fathoms Technical Specifications, click PDF
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