Named after the United States Navy?s Bureau of Ships ?water-tightness specifications of MIL-SHIPS-W-2181,? American watch brand Bulova brings back two variants of its U.S. Navy prototype dive watch from the 1950s.

The latest addition to Bulova’s ?Archive Series? is a reissue based on the design of one of the brand?s rarest pieces, a hand-wound military dive watch from the late 1950s that never made it to production. WatchTime was able to get both variants of the MIL-SHIPS for an editorial morning roll call, ahead of their release in 2021.

The original version from 1957 was intended to become the standard diving watch for the U.S. Navy. According to the official diving manual from that period, the task was clear: ?A pressure-proof wrist watch is essential to the scuba diver for computing time of dive, controlling rate of descent and ascent, and for timing various operations. [?] A pressure-proof, nonmagnetic, wrist watch that incorporates certain desirable features not available in the present watch is under development. The watch will probably be available for service test during 1958.? And it indeed was.
Both the limited 98A265 and its less expensive counterpart 98A266 are faithful reproductions of a prototype ?submersible wrist watch? made for the U.S. Navy in the late 1950s.

Completing Basic Training in 1958
According to the unclassified reports, on Feb. 5, 1958, representatives of the United States Navy?s Bureau of Ships (BuShips), ?Code 565, deliv...