The 1916 Company Inbox: Getting Started, Too Many Rolex, And More On Water Resistance

Welcome to the The 1916 Company Inbox, where we answer questions sent to us by the The 1916 Company community. This week, we’re looking at how to start out seriously collecting when you’re on a budget, whether you can have too many Rolex watches, and why moving water is, most of the time, not an issue for water resistance. 

PhD student here looking to start my watch collection journey, what do you suggest under $300?

I once faced exactly the same question – I happened to get interested in watches seriously when I simultaneously, more or less, got married, started a family, and started graduate school which is not the best time from a fiscal responsibility standpoint to start trying to accumulate watches. As it happened, however, I discovered quite quickly that Seiko, which I had known up until that point mostly as a maker of inexpensive, reliable quartz watches, had a whole line of mechanical entry level automatics which would not prevent me from buying rice, beans, formula, and diapers, or at least not having to skip one of them more than once.

That watch was a Seiko 5, which I wore for many years, through graduate school and through several years as a full-time stay-at-home parent, before eventually going back to work and I wore it to work as well (and through a major career change). I loved a lot of things about it, but not the least of these was that it was a real mechanical watch, with a really reliable, tough-as-nails mechanical movement, from a real brand with real history which seemed more interested in overdelivering on value and undercharging on price, than in gouging its clients. I would recommend any of the dozens of Seiko 5 models without reservation, but the landscape has changed since then and there are also an enormous number of Citizen watches, especially using the company’s proprietary Eco-Drive technology, which are equally compelling.

An entry level Seiko is a great start on a collecting journey that can lead to Grand Seiko

And then, finishing up the affordable watch Big Three, there is always G-Shock – there are plenty of people, including John Mayer, who collect Patek at one end, and G-Shock at the other. I have many more expensive watches than that first Seiko 5 in my collection now but I still wear it from time to time and it is still enormously satisfying. The first mechanical watch you get will probably be a more constant companion than anything you collect later.

Is there such a thing as too much Rolex in a collection?

Well, I suppose there is always a scenario where you can have too much of a good thing – examples are legion (most of mine have to do with things other than watches) but the question is can you have too many Rolex.

I have trouble imagining a scenario where more Rolex is not a good thing and I have seen enough Rolex watches on enough different wrists under enough different circumstances to feel as if there really is no such thing as too many. There are certain categories where, if you want to collect in those categories, you will have a hard time finding anything from Rolex – the company for instance, makes no repeaters, nor any perpetual calendars, nor are there any astronomical complications of any kind in its catalogue. What Rolex does have is a catalogue absolutely chock full of watches which could depending on your taste and budget, be the only watch you might ever want or need.

Which brings me back to the problem of too many Rolex. If you are collecting Rolex watches then it’s hardly possible to say that you could have too many of them –acquiring them is after all the whole point of collecting in the first place. I can imagine some scenarios where money spent buying Rolex watches, if that is not what you’re primarily interested in, might be problematic – you want to collect mid-century dress watches with unusual cases from, say, Vacheron and Patek but you keep getting distracted by Rolex because they seem to offer more immediate investment potential (for instance).

The other scenario I can think of is that Rolex watches are some of the best candidates for the single watch you’d wear every day for the rest of your life, and of course if you are collecting them, this is a pleasure you won’t ever experience. For most actual collectors and enthusiasts, this is more an abstraction to mull over than something that they would actually take steps to do. Selling off an entire collection to explore what committment to a single watch feels like, seems extremely unlikely. But ten years ago, at least one serious watch writer, explorer, and collector named Jason Heaton wondered what it would be like, and wrote about it.

Does moving water have a greater affect on seals than stagnant water when the watch is submerged?

This is sometimes referred to as the “dynamic pressure vs. static pressure” question and it appears to have been answered definitively some time ago in a post on WatchUSeek. Without getting into the actual math here, the answer to your question is that if you are swimming in a relatively calm body of water, then you would have to be moving your wrist at a very high speed in order to raise the pressure on the gasket even slightly – about 32 mph to raise the pressure on the watch by one atmosphere. As the original author of the post observed, “If you can get your arms to move that fast under water, please see your local Olympic committee, you are due for some swimming medals … ”

The caveat to this is surfing, in which the force of waves breaking can exert pressure much greater than you’d find in recreational swimming or diving. I’ve noodled around the Internet a little and I’ve seen some pretty hair-raising numbers for larger breaking waves. The issue there is that you are not dealing with the pressure of a column of water at a specific depth, but rather, the weight of a collapsing wave and if it’s a big one, you’re talking about tons of water falling on you and your watch. Conveniently enough, one thousand liters of water weighs exactly one metric ton so it is not difficult to figure out the force on impact – Surfer Today says, “According to physicists, a breaking wave can apply a pressure of between 250-6,000 pounds per square foot (1,220-29,294 kilograms per square meter), depending on its height.”

I suspect, however, that the physics of the actual pressure a watch would experience may be more complex than these quite alarming numbers might indicate – the hydrodynamics of a breaking wave seem pretty complicated. You would think that the best choice if you’re surfing big waves would be no watch at all, but apparently earlier this year the World Surf League adopted the Apple Watch as its official wearable. A completely unscientific ten minute look at some forum discussions on the subject seem to indicate that having the strap, springbars, or clasp fail is more of a concern for surfers than the gaskets. Aside from the special situation of surfing and having a big wave break over you, I don’t think you have a whole lot to worry about.

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