Rare Watches: An Invisible Watch For Under $100,000 & A Priceless Rolex Dive Watch
Where can you find the epitome of fine craftsmanship, exacting precision, and the most unwavering attention to detail? Perhaps there is no object that embodies these qualities more clearly than a high end watch – perfection for perfection’s sake. While your life may literally depend on your watch, if it’s a dive watch, a $1,000 watch is almost certainly as reliable as a $10,000 watch. Yet people choose to buy Rolex dive watches. For some, perhaps the admiration of these amazing moving works of art arises from a personal commitment to excellence. Rare watches appeal to a certain group of people.
Watchmakers - Pursuing Perfection to the Last Micron
Established watchmakers seem to understand this notion of excellence as an end in itself and embrace it, fully internalizing the imperative to strive for perfection whatever the cost. Rolex itself chose to spend a considerable sum to create a watch that could withstand the pressure at the deepest point in the ocean, and then not sell it. Why go the trouble of making parts accurate to one one thousandth of a millimeter? Is absolute excellence always necessary? Perhaps not, but some insist on excellence as a principle, as a way of life.
Rolex rose to the challenge and pushed the envelope, pursuing excellence as an end in itself. We’ll tell the tale of the famous heritage watchmaker’s trip to the darkest depths of the ocean where no light can penetrate.
The Rolex Deep Sea Challenge Dive Watch descended into the blackness to the bottom of the Marianas trench and made it back to the surface, remaining accurate every second of the trip under immense pressure. MCT, a relatively new Swiss watch maker, took on a different challenge. Their innovative watch is not a dive watch, but, like the Rolex DSC, it is a piece of functional art that evokes the goal of excellence in a particularly absolute way. With their new invisible watch, MCT offers, incredibly, a certain special rare kind of nothing, constructed with a painstaking and carefully guarded secret process.
Read on to find out how Rolex designed the DSC to withstand extreme pressure and find out why MCT’s $90,000 watch with parts you can’t see might be a very good investment. But first, the toughest dive watch in the world….
Rare Watches: Rolex Oyster Deep Sea Special aka Deep Sea Challenge
Waterproof to: 10,908 metres, 35,787 feet
Price: Not for sale
Wondering what to wear on your wrist at the very bottom of the ocean? There’s only one watch that will hold over 10,000 meters below the surface in the Mariana Trench. Fortunately, it’s a very elegant and tasteful choice. Unfortunately, it’s not for sale. But below 1,000 meters the blackness is complete anyway, so no one would see your watch...foreshadowing the un-seeable MCT watch we’ll talk about next...
When the submersible “Trieste” carried director James Cameron and National Geographic Society to the deepest point in the ocean, it wore a special Rolex Oyster on its robotic wrist. The watch was fully exposed to the pressure of 10,908 metres and continued to function perfectly throughout the voyage.
Bezels, Bevels, and a New Crown for the Crown
In just over a month, Rolex engineers redesigned Rolex’s flagship dive watch, the Oyster. First they calculated the load on the crystal and case, over-designing for 15,000 meters. The watch casing and back would need to support the equivalent of a pile of 10 SUV’s without flexing and leaking. Next one of the engineers was tasked with ensuring aesthetic values were preserved. The team expanded the rotating bezel and added a bevel to the crystal.
The Rolex engineering team used a new laser engraving technology instead of stamped relief to engrave the Rolex crown the winding crown. The movements, dial, and hand were taken from the standard Rolex Deep Sea. The rest of the watch was manufactured in the prototype workshop, each piece custom made from raw materials. In the case of the Deep Sea Challenge, 904 steel, nitrogen alloy steel, and titanium. Rolex quality control engineers ensured the part measurements were accurate to one micron – 1 one thousandth of a millimeter. The watch was tested in a special hyperbaric chamber before making its journey to the bottom of the sea.
Rolex only made five DSC watches and they were never publicly sold. If you can get James Cameron to sell you his, you’ll be on top of the world.
From the inky blackness of the depths of the Marianas Trench with a priceless watch, let us return now to the surface and contemplate the mysteries of the invisible watch you can actually buy for a little under $100,000.
Rare Watches: MCT VantaBlack Sequential One 101 Evo
Price: $95,000
Is the MCT Vantablack watch really invisible? Well, in a very literal sense, you could say parts of it are indeed invisible, because they are coated in the darkest substance known to man, so you can’t see them, in the sense of perceiving visible light coming from them . You can only see “nothing” where they are. And you have never seen nothing before, at least not in broad daylight. Reportedly, its an eerie experience, witnessing the moving Vantablack coated parts disappear against a Vantablack background.
Vantablack is a special coating of tiny carbon nanotubes grown in a lab with a secret proprietary process that reflects very close to no light, absorbing 99.965% of visible light. The Vantablack MCT watch has lovely, complex visible movements revealed by the watch’s design. But the inside of the back of the casing is coated in Vantablack, as is the tail of the second hand.
No matter how bright the light may shine on one of these nearly unique, rare watches (there are only ten) when the counterweight end of the second hand passes over the Vantablack corner, it disappears entirely into indistinguishable blackness.
Upstart Swiss watchmaker MCT, Manufacture Contemporaine Du Temps has only been around since 2007. The CEO of MCT met Anish Kapoor by chance. Kapoor had already negotiated exclusive rights to use Vantablack with its creators, Surrey Nanotech. Together, the CEO and the artist came up with the idea for the world’s first Vantablack luxury product.
The coating will be featured in an architectural installation for the 2018 Olympic Games. It is more expensive than diamonds by weight. We expect to see more Vantablack luxury products in the future, adding the unique quality of reflecting no light along with cachet, value, and rarity to existing product lines.
While Vantablack has been sold to scientific institutions for use in telescopes for deep space, the MCT is the first Vantablack product available to the public. Since MCT produced only ten of these very rare watches, we think they are certain to increase in value, representing the origin of a high-end design trend: Vantablack is the new black.
Explore Luxury with Rascal
We invite you to join us as we explore the world of luxury by following us on Medium and Facebook. If you are curious about Vantablack, we have a closer look at the rare and precious substance along with some fascinating videos illustrating the bizarre effect of utter blackness. If you enjoy gourmet food and stunning presentation and ambiance, you may enjoy our recent article that ponders the question: which restaurant in Bali will be the first to win a Michelin Star?
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