The Pasha and His Pocket Watch, the Radium Girls, and the True Story of the Rolex Explorer
The Pasha and His Pocket Watch
Mustafa Kemal Pasha
I’m sure many of you have often felt your heart drop when one of your favourite TV show characters gets shot in the chest…only to be saved by the bullet proof vest that us viewers never get to see them put on. Or perhaps you’ve even seen scenes of movies where the character is saved from being shot by objects like extremely thick bibles. However, I do wonder how many of you may know that this famously happened during the bloody Battle of Gallipoli in 1915. Well, it did, in fact it happened to Kemal Atatürk, who was saved by being hit in the chest by shrapnel by his pocket watch.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk a.k.a. Kemal Pasha is a Turkish hero of near mythological status; father of the Republic of Turkey and its first president after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire as a result of the First World War. Born in 1881 in Salonika, Greece, which at the time was an Ottoman port, his father had been an officer in the militia during the Russo-Turkish war. Kemal was close with his father despite his death at an early age. He joined the military just like him and served in several conflicts before WWII, including the Italo-Turkish War and the Balkan Wars. During WWII he was made a front-line commander for the Gallipoli Campaign (or Dardanelles Campaign), holding his strategic position despite heavy losses on both sides, and forcing his enemy (the Allies) to retreat.
The Allies, mostly made up of British and Anzac troops, started their land invasion in late April 1915. Kemal Pasha had correctly anticipated some of their attacks but failed to secure more defenses from his superiors. Kemal was already known for his bravery and often risked his life simply by charging with his soldiers as bullets whizzed by them. Before the battle on April 25th, he famously said: “I am not ordering you to fight, I am ordering you to die. In the time that it takes us to die, other forces and commanders can come and take our place." And so, as he led his troops into battle, he was struck by shrapnel in his chest only to be saved by his pocket watch. A watch, whose position in his pocket saved his life, but also propelled him to celebrity and allowed him to take political power in Turkey, creating the Turkish republic after the war.
So, although the make and model of his pocket watch remains unclear, it is certainly worth noting that sometimes…very rarely…a watch can save your life!
The Radium Girls
Women painting radioactive dials inside a factory
Every now and then, I encounter a topic that’s gotten so little coverage from within the watch community, it’s quite frankly surprising. One such case is that of the ‘Radium Girls’, the illness and death associated with the development of luminous dials in the 1920s. So, today we shine a figurative light on them, the women to thank for #fridaynightlume.
The original name for the luminous paste applied to watch dials during WWI was ‘Undark’. Undark was manufactured by the US Radium Corporation (founded in 1914) for soldiers to be able to read their watches in the dark. US Radium often promoted the fact that they used a harmless amount of radioactive material in their products, and as the radium paste market expanded, it came to be used not only in watches but also in: firearms, toys, street signs, and more. As such, there was also an expansion in the workforce, US Radium originally hired about 70 women to work in its New Jersey factory, but at its peak employed more than 4000 workers who painted about 250 dials a day.
As their brushes would constantly lose shape, the women would frequently lick them to restore the shape in between radium paste applications. Eventually, the small amounts of radiation exposure turned to radiation poisoning from the constant licking, and soon there were dozens of cases of dead employees. Dr. Edwin Leman, US Radium’s Chief Scientist, died of a type of anemia deemed to be caused by radiation poisoning in June 1925. Sarah Maillefer died shortly after, after 7 years of working at US Radium (her sister, who also worked at the company, died in December). By 1927, over 50 women had died from radiation poisoning.
The ‘Living Death’ victims suffered from radium poisoning and painful, early deaths.
US Radium denied the claims initially, and this started a multi year long court battle between legislators, radium corporations, and the women. The links between the women’s health defects were finally proven to be linked to the usage of radium. By 1938, Catherine Donohue won a pivotal court battle while on her deathbed.
The Radium Girls were the first of many incidents of bad conditions in US factories, their legal cases eventually leading to the introduction of new occupational safety standards by US Congress in 1949.
The True Story of the Rolex Explorer
Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, on Everest circa 1953 / Credit: National Geographic
A classic tale of horology, the story of the Rolex Explorer is already well known, so we’d like to take a different perspective on it and discuss an aspect that is seldom questioned: which watches were really worn on Hillary's expedition?
The story goes that Edmund Hillary, along with Tenzing Norgay, reached the summit of Mt. Everest on May 29th, 1953 wearing a Rolex Datejust and a Rolex Oyster Perpetual, the Oyster Perpetual an early version of the Rolex Explorer. Theirs was not the first attempt, but the first successful one, and therefore widely celebrated. There’s no question that Rolex sponsored the event, and it is viewed as almost certain that Norgay wore his gold Rolex Datejust, but what about Hillary’s Oyster Perpetual?
S. Smith & Sons, a successful British automotive and aviation instrument manufacturer founded in 1851, provided Hillary’s group with several instruments for their ascent, including a Smiths De Luxe watch which Hillary brought with him. Between the Smiths and the Rolex, it remains unclear which one he actually wore. In Smiths’ ads Hillary is quoted as saying he “carried” the watch to the summit, which could imply he wore the Oyster Perpetual. Then again, The Worshipful Company of Clockmakers’ Museum in London claims the Smiths was “worn during the successful climb to the summit of Mt. Everest”, which doesn’t necessarily mean it was worn on the summit, but also doesn’t exclude the possibility.
Edmund Hillary’s Rolex Oyster Perpetual, ‘taken’ by him on the 1953 Mount Everest expedition / Credit: Hodinkee
Amidst the ambiguity a question emerges: does it really matter which watch Hillary wore on the expedition? Rolex launched the Explorer the same year as the expedition, 1953, and Smiths’ watch division went under around the same time as quartz came about, not long after. Moreover, the watches used on the expedition were returned to Rolex afterwards for research, as they were prototypes (except for Norgay’s which was a gift). So, more important than which watch was worn, consider the fact that a watch was worn; the fact that watches were once considered essential pieces of equipment, tools; a quality most timepieces today do not share.
By: Eric Mulder