Blancpain is celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Fifty Fathoms Bathyscaphe, and rather than reinvent it, the brand has copied one. The new limited edition reproduces a 1968 Bathyscaphe closely enough that the main tells are the modern water resistance and the sapphire back. Monochrome published a first look on 20 August and SJX covered it the next day. Details are on blancpain.com.
The Bathyscaphe, briefly
Most people know the Fifty Fathoms as one of the first modern dive watches, a professional and mostly military-issued instrument. The Bathyscaphe was its civilian sister, launched in 1956 as a smaller, less technical skin diver for people who wanted the credentials without the size. The name came from Auguste Piccard's deep-sea submersible, the vessel his son Jacques and Don Walsh took to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in 1960. Blancpain's then-chief executive Jean-Jacques Fiechter, himself a passionate diver, registered "Bathyscaphe" as a trademark in September 1953, three years before the watch appeared. The 1956 original was 35mm. For this anniversary Blancpain looked past it to a 1968 version, which it describes as one of the most emblematic expressions of the line.
A 1968 reissue
The case is 37.4mm across, exactly the diameter of the 1968 model, and 12.3mm thick, a little more than the roughly 11mm original because water resistance is now a modern 300m. Lug-to-lug is 46.5mm, so the small diameter does not wear as small as it sounds. It is polished steel throughout, with a slim mid-case and faceted straight lugs. The unidirectional bezel, where the 1968 version turned both ways, extends into a ring at the base of a box-shaped sapphire crystal that stands in for the old plexiglass, and its insert is now ceramic with lacquered numerals rather than the original hesalite. The crown and caseback screw down, and the back carries a sapphire window the 1968 watch did not have.
The dial is where the reissue earns its keep. A sunray-brushed base in a warm "meteor grey" with a slightly faded quality, the mid-century Blancpain logo, sharp baton hands and applied 18K white gold markers, both hands and markers filled with vintage-toned Super-LumiNova. The seconds hand keeps its arrow tip, and the date at 3 is framed by a thin white line.
Calibre 1150
The looks are vintage; the movement is not. The automatic Calibre 1150 has two barrels and a 100-hour power reserve, runs at 3Hz and uses a silicon hairspring for its antimagnetic properties. It measures 26.20mm wide and 3.25mm thick, with 28 jewels and 210 parts, and through the sapphire back it shows an openworked 18K gold rotor, snail-brushed bridges and polished chamfers.
Price and the strap
The Bathyscaphe 70th Anniversary is limited to 300 pieces at CHF 13,800, delivered in a Peli case on a chocolate brown calf strap with off-white stitching and a steel pin buckle. That strap is the one point that drew comment. A 300m diver arriving on leather is a signal about how the watch is meant to be used, and more than one reader pointed at Seiko's 62MAS as a cheaper route to the same silhouette. Neither takes much away from what this is, which is a careful, restrained reproduction of a specific 1968 watch, made for people who already know why that year matters.
