When writer, director, and adventurer James Cameron reached the beginning of the ?deep sea? at a depth of 1,000 meters on March 26, 2012, safely inside his submersible craft Deepsea Challenger, all the remaining light disappeared. But at that point, he hadn?t yet completed one-tenth of his journey. At 10,908 meters, he landed softly on the floor of the Challenger Deep, the deepest point in the ocean, at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Before the hydraulic arm on the submersible malfunctioned, he was able to collect a sample from the bottom of the sea. The Rolex Deepsea Challenge, a prototype watch that could withstand water pressure to a depth of 15,000 meters, was strapped on the mechanical arm as well as on Cameron?s wrist.
Only two other people had preceded Cameron in this endeavor ? in 1960, Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh reached this point with their underwater craft, Trieste. Then, too, an experimental dive watch from Rolex, the Deep Sea Special, was attached to the outside of the pressurized chamber, and it withstood the dive in 1960 as unscathed as the Deepsea Challenge did in 2012. Rolex Deepsea D-Blue
Neither watch was ever commercially produced. The Deep Sea Special was virtually unwearable because of its enormous 35-mm thickness and domed, semi-spherical crystal above the dial. The second version was considerably smaller. It was based on the innovative case structure introduced in 2008 for the mass-produced Deepsea model, which has pressure resistance to a dept...