ROLEX OYSTERQUARTZ HISTORY
Rolex Datejust Oysterquartz’s Caliber 5035
The year is 1969, Quartz has launched its first attack against mechanical watches with Seiko’s Astron, devastating the watch industry. Rolex’s response? The Oysterquartz.
The first Rolex quartz watch was actually the Rolex Date ref. 5100, which was released in 1970 and housed the Beta 21 movement. Rolex had begun experimenting with electronic watchmaking in the 1950s, but André Heiniger, Rolex’s president at the time, saw the rise of microelectronics as banal. Therefore, quartz was largely ignored by the company until the early 1970s. That year, Heiniger hired René Le Coultre to head up the electronics lab in which Rolex would produce its in-house quartz movements (they used the CEH/Beta movements until then). Rolex finally launched their quartz calibers in 1977; the Oysterquartz were equipped with calibers 5035 (date) or 5055 (day-date) and had strong sales, albeit having a distinctly different case with respect to other Rolexes - no Oyster! They were of course beautifully adorned for quartz movements at the time, as you can tell by the Geneva Stripes above.
The Oysterquartz went on to be produced for 25 years, with an estimated 25,000 manufactured. Rolex actually produced modern quartz movements (Calibers 5335 and 5355) in 2001 for the next generation of Oysterquartz. Although, in 2001, for unknown reasons, the line was discontinued. Mysteriously however, on November 14th, 2004, an unmarked Rolex Oysterquartz appeared at an Antiquorum auction with a Caliber 5335 and a date function that included a perpetual calendar mechanism. A model that was supposedly never produced...