On August 6th, 1926, one of the most legendary days in sports history occurred.
Gertrude Ederle, aged 20, had already become a distinguished swimmer by then; her first world record was at 15, she had earned three medals from the 1924 Olympics in Paris, and a swim from NYC to New Jersey (specifically, Battery Park to Sandy Hook) set a time of 7 hours 11 minutes that was not only a world record, but one that stood for 81 years.
On that day in August, she made her second attempt on the English Channel. Her first attempt the year before was aborted early when her trainer thought she was drowning. This time she had a new trainer, one of the five men who had previously made it across the Channel safely. She did the entire swim in 14.5 hours, and not only became the first woman to swim across the English Channel, but beat the fastest time overall; she had the world record for men and women.
This led to fame, meeting the US president, and a ticker-tape parade. It also led to disappointment to others trying to do the same feat, one of those being Mercedes Gleitze, who had made seven attempts (all failed) prior to Ederle's success.
There was still the matter of the first European woman to do the crossing, and Gleitze made an eighth attempt in 1927, which was successful. She did her attempt in early October, which made the water rather a bit colder than Gertrude Ederle's swim, and did it in 15 hours and 15 minutes.
This didn't make for the immediate ticker-tape parade that Ederle had, not because of loss of interest in the feat -- she was met by a cheering crowd -- but because 4 days later another woman, Dr. Dorothy Logan, claimed to do the feat faster, at 13 hr 10 min. This turned out to be a hoax and she eventually recanted, which led some to doubt Gleitze's feat by association. Gleitze decided the only response was to accomplish the feat again.
This caught the eye of the company Rolex. They had just introduced the first waterproof watch in history, the Oyster; Hans Wilsdorf, cofounder, sent a letter asking if Gleitze would wear one on the so-called "redemption swim". She agreed to, and had it around her neck for the swim from France to England.
Unfortunately, as the water was already cold, and her second attempt was two weeks later, she was not able to make the full swim; after 10 hours she was in so hazardous of condition that she had to be pulled out of the water. But in the eyes of the public -- some of which came along in a boat alongside -- she was redeemed, and the original feat was no longer doubted.
This not only led to celebrity endorsements of other products ("Miss Gleitze Beat the Channel on Lipton’s Tea") but an absolute coup for Rolex, who was able to invoke the feat long after it originally happened; here's an ad from 2010.
Rolex had storekeepers put the watch in water-filled fishbowls at their windows. The idea of waterproof was also attached to keeping out dirt, and dust, and the more regular of life's potential sources of damage.
While waterproof, the Oyster was not a proper dive watch, as it could not go deep; that would wait for a different company, the Omega, and their Marine. The Fifty Fathoms in 1953 became the first "proper" dive watch; through all this time the Oyster was still being sold, and the dive watch held a particular technical sophistication, holding a sense of quality rather akin to people buying a Space Pen even though they have no need to actually travel in outer space.
In the end, the high-end dive watch was really an extension of the cultural advertising coup that happened when Miss Gleitze Beat the Channel and the subsequent association built from the variety of companies that extended the idea, not really having to do with "real" diving; this is especially apparent when you look at modern diving wristwear, which are computers which look nothing at all that you might associate with a high end watch.
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Chambers, C. (2013). An advertiser's dream: the construction of the "consumptionist" cinematic persona of Mercedes Gleitze. Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, (6), 1-20.
Mortimer, G. (2008). The Great Swim. Bloomsbury.
Pember, D. (2019). In the Wake of Mercedes Gleitze: Open Water Swimming Pioneer. United Kingdom: History Press.
