Rolex Explorer 6150 linked to the Royal Navy; the HMS Reclaim diving team that would test it. (Rolex Archives)
On March 11, 1952, a representative from Rolex U.K. drove to a remote location in Scotland and hand-delivered “three steel Rolex Oyster Perpetual watches” to a Royal Navy crew conducting deepwater training in a nearby loch, according to archives unearthed by author Nicholas Foulkes for a new book about the Submariner titled “Oyster Perpetual Submariner: The Watch that Unlocked the Deep.”
This rare military partnership with the Royal Navy was unknown until now in the history of the development of Rolex's most famous dive watch. The correspondence between the navy and Rolex executives was kept buried in Rolex’s archives in Geneva. As the divers took the watch to considerable depths, it provided the brand with a great opportunity to gather data from real-world tests and improve the watch.
(Credit: Rolex Archives)
Still, in 1952, the Rolex watches on the wrists of the elite Royal Navy divers were not called Submariner but were known as Explorer models, reference 6150. That the Submariner was born from the Explorer is another revelation from the archives about the origin of Rolex’s dive watch.
The Explorer model 6150 would be improved upon thanks to the Admiralty with a larger dial and a rotating bezel, according to the book, even becoming at some point “the official Royal Naval divers’ watch,” waterproof down to 400 feet.