Blancpain Bathyscaphe ‘Skin Diver’

Before dive watches became luxury design objects, they were simply equipment. This Blancpain Bathyscaphe comes from that world.

Dating to around 1960, this 37 mm steel Bathyscaphe was conceived as the more wearable sibling to Blancpain’s famous Fifty Fathoms. The proportions are smaller and cleaner, but the diving ingredients we all know are still here: a rotating bezel, black dial and a case built around underwater use.

This particular example has plenty of details to get excited about. The original bezel has survived with the watch, the hands retain their original radium luminous material, and at three o’clock sits a roulette date wheel, alternating its colours as the dates pass. Small details, but exactly the sort that make an early tool watch feel special seventy years later.

The dial is wonderfully functional. Large luminous markers, Arabic numerals at twelve, six and nine and broad hands were designed to be read quickly rather than admired under a loupe. Today, of course, the ageing and patina make it very difficult for enthusiasts to not do exactly that.

Inside sits an automatic A. Schild calibre 1555AN with Blancpain’s R585 rotor, a period construction associated with these larger vintage Bathyscaphe models.

The Bathyscaphe story began in 1956, three years after the Fifty Fathoms. Jean-Jacques Fiechter wanted a diver that could work below the surface but also make sense as an everyday watch, naming it after Swiss explorer Auguste Piccard’s famous deep-diving vessel. In other words: the skin diver idea, before anyone gave it that name.

A circa-1960 Blancpain diver with an original bezel, roulette date, radium hands and the R585 automatic setup inside. Smaller and less famous than the Fifty Fathoms, perhaps, but certainly not less interesting. Available at Reestraat 3, Amsterdam.