Like a forgotten clock, the stage for Rolex's largest publication of the year prepared

Rolex's relationship with technology goes back to the early 1960s when they followed a group of 20 Swiss brands (the “Ceh”) to develop a quartz bracelet movement.

Although Seiko's quartz astron was beaten by Seiko from 1969, the fruit of her work was the Beta 21, a quartz movement that was known in Ref. 5100 – also known as “Texano” in Watches of Omega, Patek Philippe and, even Rolex.

However, these early quartz movements were only the first generation of such caliber and left plenty of space for improvements. So Rolex finally left the consortium to develop his own movement in 1972.

A new collection

For brands that were completely invested in traditional mechanical watchmaking, the jump was not insignificant to develop and produce a battery -operated quartz movement.

In Rolex's case, the brand took five years before its internal quartz zip was ready for the market. Until 1977, the officially mentioned Oysterquartz was ready for the main time and worked with a frequency of about four times as high as the first astron des Seiko.