The Rolex Milgauss

This was a somewhat atypical year for Rolex. While the firm in general devotes itself to incremental updates to existing models, which capture the imagination of the watch-buying public out of all proportion to the objective degree of those changes, this year some of the biggest news from Rolex and indeed, from Watches And Wonders overall, were Rolex watches whose impact was based on being unexpectedly whimsical. Rolex has done a lot of out-of-the-ordinary and even over the top pieces since 1905, but I think it’s safe to say that an emoji take on the Day-Date that exhorts you to forget about the day and the date and live in the moment, is something nobody saw coming (I sure as hell didn’t).

In all the hullabaloo, there were a couple of momentous – I thought they were momentous, anyway – other announcements, two of which snuck in largely under the radar. The first was the discontinuation of an entire produce family – the Cellini family. This was little noted, nor undoubtedly will it be long remembered (if quoting the Gettysburg Address in a watch story isn’t too presumptuous) and a line of dressy, or at least non-sporty, luxury watches named after an Italian goldsmith was never going to be top of mind for most Rolex customers or enthusiasts, but they’d been around since the 1960s and included some iconic models, including the King Midas.

The second momentous discontinuation was not of an entire family, but of a particular model and for that reason perhaps it hits a little harder. The watch that got the axe was the Rolex Milgauss which, let’s face it, was not exactly ever going to be a watch that took the world by storm, but it had perhaps partly for that very reason, a kind of idiosyncratic appeal which is not found in some of the Crown’s unquestionably more popular models.

I wouldn’t ever have called the Milgauss an orphan watch exactly, but there’s no doubt that it was an outlier. One of the things that I’ve always liked about the history of Rolex is that the company has sometimes made very specific watches for very particular applications, at least when they were first released. Making watches that are suitable for saturation diving, and especially for that long period in a topside decompression chamber when you’re bringing the partial pressure of gas in the diver’s bodies down to sea level, is not exactly something that a ton of people need but it turns out (as I suspect Rolex suspected it would) that a lot of people like having the tech regardless. This is despite the fact that actual saturation divers make up, to put it mildly, an extremely small slice of the general population – in 2015, out of slightly over 3,000 commercial divers in the USA (already a tiny fraction of the total population of 320 million) there were 336 saturation divers.

The same is true of the Explorer II – the watch was originally billed by Rolex as a useful aid to spelunkers – cave explorers. I can’t think of a more niche group (except maybe saturation divers). The Explorer II has gone on to have a rich, fulfilling second career as a travel watch, since getting an update to an adjustable 24 hour hand in 1985, and Rolex in its wisdom advertised it for many years as a generally tough watch for tough people in tough situations. I can’t even find a number for how many spelunkers there are in the US in any given year, maybe because people are reluctant to identify themselves as the practitioners of a rare (and often very dangerous) form of backwards mountain-climbing with a name that sounds like an obscure Scandinavian winter sport.

The Milgauss, like the Explorer II and Sea-Dweller (oh, and I guess I should throw the Tru-Beat in there – a deadbeat second “doctor’s watch,” forsooth) started out as a watch for a very particular audience. When it was first launched, in the early 1950s, it was unique among professional watches in that it was not intended to protect against natural phenomena like water pressure, or physical impacts, or the Stygian darkness of the bowels of the Earth. Instead, it was designed as a man-made product to solve a man-made problem: The effects of magnetic fields on the movement of a watch.

The fact that magnetism is not recognized as one of the great historic problems of precision watchmaking is because by and large, ambient magnetic fields from the natural environment aren’t strong enough to disturb a watch. For hundreds of years, precision watchmaking advanced very nicely with the use of blued steel balance springs – which will pick up a magnetic field if you look at them funny – without any noticeable disruption from magnetic fields, not even during observatory trials. By the beginning of the 20th century, though, magnetic fields from industrial and scientific sources were becoming more and more common and by World War II, watches made for aviation were often shielded against magnetism produced by the aircraft’s equipment and engines.

The way you did this in those days, was to use what’s colloquially called a soft iron dial and inner case. The technical name for the nickel-iron alloy in question is mu-metal (the Greek letter μ is the symbol for magnetic permeability). Contrary to nearly universal misuse in the watch community, a mu-metal shield is not a Faraday cage; the difference is subtle but a Faraday cage shields against electromagnetic fields, while a mu-metal inner case shields against magnetic fields. It does this by having very low resistance to magnetic field lines, which will tend to flow through the case and dial, bypassing the sensitive parts of the movement.

The Milgauss was not the first purpose-built antimagnetic watch – Vacheron Constantin, of all brands, made an antimagnetic pocket watch in 1915 and in 1930, Tissot launched an antimagnetic wristwatch – the first I know of – with the pragmatic name “Antimagnetique.” The Milgauss was one of the first generation of post-war antimagnetic watches and was aimed at anyone working in scientific or engineering fields who might find themselves and their watches exposed to strong magnetic fields.

One client for the Milgauss was the organization known as CERN – the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, which was founded in 1954 to do particle research and which today operates the Large Hadron Collider, the first machine in human history so powerful that its operators felt obliged to issue a statement that it would probably not produce a black hole that would destroy the Earth.

One way you find out what’s inside subatomic particles is by smashing them into each other and examining the collision debris (which may strike someone new to the subject as similar to figuring out what a car is made of by running it headlong into another car, but the system works). Particle accelerators use extremely strong magnets to contain their particle beams, so CERN researchers were a logical market – in order to avoid creating interference with radiation-sensitive equipment, Rolex produced variations on the Milgauss that had non-radium dials (these are among the most collectible vintage Milgauss models, if you can find one). Like the Explorer II, the Milgauss was originally aimed at a fairly narrow market but the audience for the watch broadened over time – Rolex even handed them out as prizes to winning drivers at motorsports events for a while.

The original Milgauss went out of production in 1988, but Rolex decided to relaunch the model in 2007 and that’s the model that most enthusiasts are familiar with today. The new version of the Milgauss came in a 40mm case, and brought back the lightning bolt seconds hand found on the vintage reference 6541. All the new Milgauss models from the period 2007 to 2023 are mighty sharp looking if you ask me. There is something very compelling about that lightning bolt seconds hand, which reminds lots of people of the comic book character Shazam (also known originally as Captain Marvel, speaking of re-editions) but which has always, if I may date myself (again) reminded me of that beloved cartoon spokesperson for your friendly neighborhood power plant, Reddy Kilowatt, whom I first remember seeing in a short film presentation, during my long-ago youth, at the now long-shuttered and unlamented Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. (For more on the various modern models, check out Emily Smith’s convenient short history of the Milgauss).

Now I said before that in general the Milgauss has throughout its history been kind of a niche model and while that’s true, it did get its share of time in the limelight. It’s shown up on the wrists of celebrities, including Roger Federer, Daniel Craig, and Ashton Kutcher, and while it was never the enduring perpetual celebrity that the GMT Master II or the Submariner are, well, few watches are in any event, and the fact that it was such a relatively specific and specialized watch was a big part of its appeal – a feature, not a bug.

For its entire lifetime – both in the vintage and modern years – the Milgauss has relied on basically the same antimagnetic shielding technology, in the form of a mu-metal inner case and dial. The newer models benefitted from the paramagnetic Rolex Parachrom balance spring, which is made of a niobium-zirconium alloy, but those models also retained the soft iron inner shield as well.

Now, I suspect that the Milgauss in later versions especially, could resist magnetic fields a lot more powerful than 1,000 gauss if called upon to do so (not that 1,000 gauss – equivalent to about 80,000 A/m if you’re looking for a comparison – is anything to sneeze at) at least my experience with the Milgauss, and magnets, leads me to think so. However, antimagnetic materials science in watchmaking has come a long way since the 1950s and a soft iron inner case and dial, is no longer state of the art.

Then again, neither is a manual transmission and we all know how most serious gearheads feel about driving a stick. There is something incredibly charming about the ingenuity, simplicity, and effectiveness of the old-school mu-metal shielding, and that combined with the styling of the discontinued Milgauss models makes them compelling in a way that more contemporary materials science and fabricating techniques are not. Nothing against making watches that are essentially impervious to magnetic fields of any strength (practically speaking) but the joy of owning a Milgauss is the joy of owning something with a direct design and technical connection to a small but proud and important horological lineage which is not easily duplicated elsewhere, Yes, dive watches have relied on screw down case components and gaskets for just as long but it is hard to get worked up about gaskets. (Some people would think me odd for getting worked up about soft iron cases, I guess).

It took about half an hour after the news went out that the Milgauss was discontinued for the first messages to hit my inbox asking if they were now collectible – well, they were collectible before anyway and I suppose they are even more so now. But the beauty of the Milgauss is truly its own (especially the models with green crystals) and the best reason for owning a Milgauss now, is what’s always been the best reason for owning a Milgauss – they’re freaking cool.