Rolex Essentials

§     1910
Rolex is the first watch to gain chronometer certification, which means the watch is guaranteed to be accurate within -4 to +6 seconds per day.

§      1926
Rolex invents the world's first waterproof time case. In 1927, a young English woman, Mercedes Gleitze, swims across the English Channel wearing a Rolex.

§      1931
Rolex invents the automatic movement, the first watch powered by the movement of a wearer's wrist.

§      1945
Rolex introduces the DateJust, which becomes the first watch to display the date.

§      1947
Super pilot Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier wearing a Rolex Oyster. He is later featured in Rolex advertisements.

§      1952
Rolex introduces the Cyclops magnifying lens, the first of its kind, which allows the date on a watch to be easily read.

§      1953
As part of a publicity stunt, a Rolex prototype is attached to the outside of a submarine for a deep sea dive to show off its imperviousness to water. It passes with flying colors and is moved from concept to production. That watch, officially launched in 1954, becomes Rolex's most famous and copied model, the Submariner. Sean Connery and three other silver-screen Bonds wear a Rolex Submariner.

Also in 1953, Sir Edmund Hillary, sporting a Rolex Explorer, becomes the first person to scale Mt. Everest.

§      1960
Rolex creates a special watch that is submerged to 35,787 feet in the Pacific Ocean, the deepest a timepiece has ever traveled.

§      1971
The Sea Dweller is released, the first watch to feature a helium escape valve for very deep dives.

§      2008
Rolex replaces the Sea Dweller with the Sea Dweller Deep Sea, which is rated to depths of 12,800 feet.

Other Interesting Facts

• Rolex has been owned by the same two families and their successors for its entire existence.
• Rolex watches consistently retain a higher resale value than any other watch in the world.
• Most of the profits Rolex makes go to charitable causes.
  
•  In 2007 BusinessWeek ranked Rolex no. 72 on its annual list of the most important global brands, top among all watchmakers. The influential newsweekly says the Swiss company is "the ultimate luxury brand worldwide" and "its appeal continues to spread."
• Rolex is by far the biggest watch advertising spender in the United States
  

• One that you hear often is that it takes Rolex a year to build a watch. Rolex does little to dispel this myth and in fact promotes it in some of its advertising. But this claim is widely ridiculed within the industry. Anyone who has seen Rolex's new watch manufacturing center in Geneva knows it's a near perfect fusion of automation and technology. When you consider that Rolex is producing more than 4,000 watches a day, this one-year-to-build claim is exposed for what it is--propaganda designed to create a romantic myth around the idea of watchmaking.
• James Bond only wears Rolex watches. Although Sean Connery briefly wore a Breitling for the underwater scene in Thunderball, Rolex was the choice of Bond through the Connery, George Lazenby, and early Roger Moore films. However, beginning with The Spy Who Loved Me, Moore's Bond wore a Seiko for five straight films. Timothy Dalton's Bond returned to Rolex before Pierce Brosnan turned to the Omega Seamaster, which has recently become known as the "007 Bond watch"—so much so that Omega released a special limited-edition 007 version of the watch in 2002.
• Rolex makes the world's best watches. Rolex makes superior watches and is credited with several important innovations but that doesn't mean it makes the world's best watches. Rolex may be the best known luxury brand but Patek Philippe is widely considered by experts to be the industry's premium watchmaker. Sometimes, Audemars Piguet and Vacheron Constantin are mentioned in the same breath as Patek Philippe.
• An expensive watch, like a Rolex, keeps better time than an inexpensive one, like a Timex. Actually, a $20 Timex will probably keep better time than a $5,000 Rolex. The reason for this is that most watches under $500 use quartz movements, which are cheap to produce and are highly accurate. Mechanical movements, usually the domain of more premium watches like a Rolex, are inherently more complicated and expensive to produce and will not tell better time than a quartz watch. In addition, you will pay more for a watch often because of its value as a piece of jewelry.