Rolex. A rare stainless steel automatic calendar bracelet watch

Double Red Sea Dweller, Ref: 1665, Circa 1972

Footnotes

One of the most appealing things about vintage diving watches is that they were used for the purpose for which they were made. The current lot is a great example of this having been owned by a professional deep sea saturation diver who wore it around the world in places such as Russia, India, Africa and Bermuda.

Used extensively as a working watch in the North Sea oilfields, this watch along with its owner would dive to depths of up to 200 metres and survived periods of up to a month at a time confined in pressurised saturation diving chambers. These chambers were filled will heliox gas which would enable the men to launch and dive in a diving bell to the sea floor. One of the design features that made the Sea Dweller such a vital piece of equipment was how it handled during decompression post dive.

Decompression can take up to 5 days and to avoid the watch from getting damaged Rolex designed the Sea Dweller 2000 to be the first production watch to employ a gas-escape valve on the band of the case. This one way valve automatically releases built up gas from inside the case when the diver rises from the deep sea environment without which the watch would be in danger of popping the seals. Interestingly, the plexi glass covering the dial did not feature the usual cyclops magnifying the date window as it adds a pressure point which would cause a weakness.

The 'Double-Red' Sea-Dweller reference 1665 appeared in the Rolex catalogue from 1972 until 1975. The nickname refers to the two red printed lines on the dial setting it apart from the Single Red and Great White versions of the same model.