James Bond's Favourite Diver
When you think of luxury watch brands...
Omega always comes up in the conversation.
Sure, it's probably not the first brand to come to mind,
But it's definitely one of the most infamous watch brands ever.
Omega have made loads of different watches over the years,
But by far one of the most popular ones that they've ever made is the Seamaster.
Not only is this one of the most well known Omegas of all time...
It's also undeniably one of the most well known dive watches ever made.
With all this being said...
Let's get into the history about one of the coolest watches to ever grace the earth:
The Seamaster was launched in 1948 for Omega's 100 year anniversary.
Omega based it on the watches that they gave to the British soldiers for WW2 that were, for obvious reasons, robust and waterproof.
The funny thing about the Seamaster is that although today its thought of as one today, it actually wasn't designed as a dedicated dive watch.
The Seamaster was made as an elegant everyday timepiece with better water resistance than what watches usually had back then. This water resistance was achieved with the use of a rubber O-ring, which was a groundbreaking feature at the time (thats so good that it's still used today).
The Seamaster evolved into the divewatch we know it as today by the mid 1950s, as water related activities (in this case particularly scuba diving) started gaining more popularity, and Omega wanted to have a watch that could compete with Rolex's infamous Submariner.
In 1957, Omega came out with a proper dive watch that was designed for professional divers called the Seamaster 300. This watch was capable of 200m of water resistance (even though it's name suggested that it was capable of 300m lol).
Over the years, Omega kept innovating the Seamaster, most notably in:
- 1968, where they added the helium escape valve, which was essential for saturation divers (who perform work deep at sea such as building and tunneling) to prevent crystal damage during decompression, and in
- 1970 when they came out with the Seamaster 600, a diver with a whopping 600m water resistance, built for extreme underwater conditions.
(Fun fact, the Seamaster 600 was tested by Jacques Cousteau, a legendary underwater explorer.)
The Seamaster became one of the most iconic watches of all time in 1995, when Pierce Brosnan (James Bond) wore a Seamster 300m Quartz Professional in "GoldenEye".
Since then, Omega has always been Bond's watch brand of choice, and other Seamasters can be seen being worn by Daniel Craig (Bond) in films such as "No Time To Die" and "Casino Royale".
As you can imagine, this continued to make the Seamaster a more and more well known icon of the watch world.
Omega still sells Seamasters to this day, such as the Aqua Terra, a beautiful and versatile watch, and I don't see that stopping any time soon.
I want to end off this article with by saying this:
Even though there are more popular watches that the Seamaster, it will always have one of the coolest histories of any watch ever.
And...
It will always be James Bond's diver of choice.