Blancpain sponsors underwater expeditions by French marine biologist Laurent Ballesta.
Image: Manufacturer
In the early years of recreational diving, mechanical wristwatches with a unidirectional rotating scale ring were the order of the day. The Blancpain Fifty Fathoms was the first diving watch of its kind. It is now celebrating its 70th birthday.
DIt almost went wrong. The young diver Jean-Jacques Fiechter got into trouble because he misjudged his surfacing time during a dive near Villefranche-sur-Mer. This is actually unthinkable today because underwater athletes wear diving computers on their wrists that provide all the necessary information underwater. In addition to the computer, some divers also use a mechanical depth gauge and a mechanical wristwatch as redundant instruments. “Then you are on the safe side if the computer actually fails,” says Dietmar W. Fuchs from the German sports diving association VDST.
But Fiechter was what one would call an “early adopter” today. He dived in the early 1950s. There were no diving computers for a long time – they only came in the 1980s – and not even a really suitable diving watch, at least in Fiechter’s opinion. The Swiss was not only a diver, but also an entrepreneur. In 1950 he took over the management of the watch manufacturer Blancpain – and retained the managing director position for 30 years. At that time, the company’s full name was “Rayville SA Montres Blancpain, Manufactures d’horlogerie de précision”, where Rayville was nothing more than a phonetic anagram of the company’s location in Villeret.
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