A watch writer based in Australia has recently made an interesting discovery about a Rolex brochure. Nick Gould posted on his Instagram account on Saturday that Rolex tinkered with a picture to show a navigator in the 1950s wearing a GMT-Master while in fact he wasn't wearing one, a sign of how far the brand was willing to go to market its watches as professional tools.
Nick said he had recently stumbled upon the original photo by accident. The 1955 photo shows a navigator taking Loran readings, an early radio system used for long-range navigation. In the original photo, the man wears a white-dial watch that looks nothing like a Rolex.
The picture used by Rolex and captioned “…for pilots, ships' captains, navigators, travellers and members of the Armed Forces” shows a GMT-Master on the wrist of the navigator. Rolex seemed to have super-imposed a drawn GMT-Master 6542 on his wrist — an early method of “photoshopping,” as Nick puts it — and used the picture for the cover of the GMT-Master booklet included with the watch.