The Top 5 Dive Watches: The Blancpain Fifty Fathoms
If you study up enough on the history of iconic watches (which I thought I had) you get to know the most famous stories very well. Eventually, you accept them as fact and defend them against any view put forward by sceptics.
It gets really interesting, then, if one of said sceptics suddenly turns up with a whole bunch of pretty irrefutable evidence proving everything you had taken as gospel about a certain watch has, in fact, fallen out the back of a boy cow. The origins of the Blancpain Fifty Fathoms is the latest example.
I, along with many others I hasten to add, have long held the opinion that the model was the very first example of what we would now call the modern dive watch. However, according to some recent debunking, that is not the case and might well be the result of some ambitious marketing spin.
We’ll get into the specifics in a minute, but it should be said that the revelations take nothing away from the Fifty Fathoms as a watch. It deserves its place among the pantheon of great diving timepieces no matter what. That out of the way, let’s take a look at the actual story.
A Little History
Let’s start at the beginning.
On one side, we have a gentleman named Jean-Jacques Fiechter. Along with being the CEO of Blancpain, Fiechter was also a keen Scuba diver who, crucially, was known to have enjoyed diving excursions with a friend of his named René-Paul Jeanneret, public relations director at Rolex.
*As a quick footnote, Blancpain had been renamed ‘Rayville S.A., successeur de Blancpain’ during the time of the Fifty Fathoms introduction—the change having to be made because of a peculiarity of Swiss law. Originally established in 1735, Blancpain is the oldest registered watch brand in the world and stayed in the hands of the Blancpain family all the way up to 1932. In that year, Frédéric-Emile, the last of the line to run the company, died. His only daughter, Berthe-Nellie, declined to take over and so the business was bought up by two members of staff; Betty Fiechter (aunt of Jean-Jacques) and sales director André Léal. As there was no longer any Blancpain blood in control, Fiechter and Léal were obliged by law to change the name. They chose Rayville because it is a phonetic anagram of Villeret, the Swiss village in which Blancpain was established nearly 300-years ago.*
As noted, Jean-Jacques Fiechter loved diving, mainly in the South of France and it just so happened that on one trip he came close to running out of air, ironically for the head of a watch company, due to losing track of time. Fairly keen for it not to happen again, Fiechter set about designing a dive watch.
On the other side of the story, and more or less simultaneously, we have two French Navy officers, Captain Robert ‘Bob’ Maloubier and Lieutenant Claude Riffaud. Fresh from special forces heroics in WWII, the pair had been charged by their government with setting up a new unit of military combat swimmers, the Nageurs de Combat. As well as hand selecting their squadron of frogmen, Maloubier and Riffaud also had to choose their equipment. Key among the requirements was a watch that could withstand some unique punishment.
The team field tested the existing French ‘water resistant’ models on the market and found them to be extremely lacking. As well as being too small and hard to read, none were up to the standards of waterproofing required. All, to quote Maloubier, ‘drowned to death’.
The solution was an obvious one. Like Fiechter, the two men sat down with a pen, a set of compasses and some graph paper and devised their own dive watch. Their list of criteria included a high contrast dial with hands and numerals large enough to be read underwater, and a great deal of luminescence for particularly murky conditions. It would also need a rotating bezel and enough antimagnetic protection to remain unaffected by any of their divers’ other kit. And, of course, it had to have a highly water resistant case.
Taking their design out to tender, several French manufactures reportedly laughed in their faces claiming ‘diving watches have no future.’ Fortunately, naval supplier Spirotechnique (now Aqua Lung) acted as intermediary and put Riffaud in touch with Blancpain.
Here, he found that Fiechter had already completed the watch and had called it the Fifty Fathoms, the name taken from Ariel’s song in Shakespeare’s The Tempest in which she sings, ‘Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made.’
The only change Riffaud requested was the addition of the antimagnetic cover. Otherwise it was good to go.
What’s In a Date?
So far, this probably all sounds roughly like the story with which you are familiar. The big change comes when we look at some of the dates involved. Specifically, the patents.
The version of events I had always been led to believe is that Blancpain released the Fifty Fathoms in 1953, a few months before Rolex brought out the debut Submariner, leading to the oft repeated claim that Blancpain had come up with the first ever dive watch. However, that now appears to be untrue.
To begin with, there is no mention of the Fifty Fathoms in any horological journal before 1955. That alone should cast doubt, as something as revolutionary as the first fully-fledged dive watch would certainly have created headlines throughout the industry.
But then we have to look at the innovations. Contrary to another ‘well-known’ detail, the Fifty Fathoms did not have a unidirectional bezel, nor did it hold the patent for one. What it did have was a new type of locking mechanism, requiring the wearer to push down on the bezel before it would turn, in either direction. For that it did indeed hold the copyright, but it wasn’t filed until June 19th, 1954, one month after Rolex presented the Submariner at the Basel Watch Fair. Similarly, the trademark registration for the name ‘Fifty Fathoms’ was filed on the 11th June, 1954, while the commercial use of the name didn’t happen until August 30th. Finally, it is believed that the first instance of the watch being offered for sale was in May 1955.
As a result, it would seem more likely that the Fifty Fathoms was ‘inspired’ by the Submariner rather than the other way around as is sometimes suggested. Especially as Rolex director René-Paul Jeanneret is known to have worn a prototype Sub on a test dive as early as 1951, going as deep as 50m.
Personally, I’m not sure any of this matters. The Fifty Fathoms has always been a great watch on its own merits. In addition to the bezel lock, Blancpain also conceived of a novel double sealed crown system to prevent water leaking into the case even if the crown were to be accidentally pulled out during a dive. They improved on the case back design too, creating a channel for the O-ring to sit in to avoid it becoming warped, and so lose its waterproofing integrity, when the back was screwed on to the middle case (both of these innovations were patented in 1954 as well).
The model was given an automatic movement, the A. Schild AS 1361N calibre, so the winding crown (the most vulnerable spot of any watch design) would need to be used as infrequently as possible, and it came with a hacking function to help military units synchronize their actions more accurately. In short, it doesn’t need the brand’s exaggerations or hard sell; the Fifty Fathoms is a legend all the same.
The Fifty Fathoms Goes Commercial
Unlike those watches tested by Maloubier and Riffaud, the debut reference of the Fifty Fathoms passed all the requirements of the Nageurs de Combat with flying colors and became their official timepiece.
The French government, however, insisted that all naval supplies be bought from French companies and so Blancpain formulated a deal with Spirotechnique to supply the watch. One of Spirotechnique’s brands was Aqualung, the name under which the Fifty Fathoms was sold, and through that connection the watch fell into the hands of Jacques-Yves Cousteau. The co-inventor of the first open circuit, self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, Cousteau and his team chose the Fifty Fathoms to wear while filming many of his underwater documentaries.
The model was adopted by several European Navies and performed excellent service, but getting it in front of the United States Navy was more complicated.
The Buy American Act was imposing heavy restrictions on imported goods so, to get around them, a New York diamond dealer named Allen V. Tornek struck an agreement to supply the Fifty Fathoms to the USN, his job made much easier by the fact the watch was just about the only one which could match their demanding specs.
One such prerequisite was a moisture indicator, which would signal if any water had leaked inside the watch. Fiechter’s solution was a small, two-color disc fitted to the dial, one side pale blue, the other red. If any water got into the case, the blue half of the disc would also turn red confirming a fault.
Tornek still had to set up a small testing laboratory to verify every watch Blancpain imported onto U.S. soil before landing the contract. That particular variant became known as the Milspec 1, featuring a matte finish case, and was issued to the U.S. Navy Seals, perhaps the highest praise a military watch can receive.
As for the civilian editions, these too needed a slight adjustment. The earliest examples of the watch used radium for their lume, as did every other luminescent model. But, when the dangers of the material became better known, watch brands the world over switched to the much safer tritium. To signify that change, and reassure the public, Blancpain added a bright yellow and red radiation mark with a cross through it onto the dial to signify the removal of any harmful substances.
The Modern Fifty Fathoms
In 1961, Blancpain merged with the SSIH and continued to evolve its line of Fifty Fathoms watches.
Sadly, during the upheavals of the 1970s, the conglomerate was forced to concentrate on staving off the Japanese onslaught by making quartz models of its own and so production of the Fifty Fathoms was halted.
In 1982, the Blancpain name was sold to the partnership of Frédéric Piguet and Jean-Claude Biver who then sold it back 10-years later to the SSIH, now known as the Swatch Group.
With the allure of quartz watches gone as quickly as it had arrived, the Fifty Fathoms made a triumphant return in 1997 as part of a trilogy representing land, sea and air, alongside the GMT and a reimagined Air Command pilot’s watch.
Since then, the model has remained not only in constant production, but has also splintered into an expansive range of different variants.
The current collection holds some 130 watches, with everything from simple time only pieces, the reduced size Bathyscaphe collection, faithful recreations of some vintage icons (including the Mil-Spec and No Rad), a number of chronographs, some full calendar and moonphase models, annual calendars, tourbillons and the extraordinary 55.6mm X Fathoms, complete with mechanical depth gauge and maximum depth memory.
So, while it may not have been the first, Blancpain can still rightfully claim to have created one of the original and very best dive watches in the history of the genre. A distinctive, handsome and fabulously capable luxury tool watch, its legend is secured.
Featured Photo: Mixed art by Oriol Mendivil for BKT Archive.

