Hans Wilsdorf was a Bavarian orphan who moved to London in 1905 and started selling wristwatches at a time when nobody serious wore one. The pocket watch was the gentleman's instrument. The wristwatch was, more or less, for women and for cavalry officers who could not be bothered to dig into a tunic during a charge. Wilsdorf disagreed with all of this. He thought the wristwatch was the future, and he set out to make one accurate and durable enough that men would have to take it seriously.
He named the company Rolex in 1908 — a word, by his own account, chosen because it was short, pronounceable in every language, and looked good on a dial. In 1910, a Rolex movement became the first wristwatch in the world to receive a Swiss certificate of chronometric precision. In 1914, the Kew Observatory in England issued a Class A certificate — a grade previously reserved for marine chronometers. The wristwatch, suddenly, was serious.
The Oyster, and everything after
The 1926 Oyster case — sealed with a screwed-down bezel, caseback, and winding crown — was the first commercially successful waterproof wristwatch. The following year, Mercedes Gleitze swam the English Channel with one strapped to her wrist. It worked. Wilsdorf bought the entire front page of the Daily Mail to announce the news. He invented, somewhere in there, the modern luxury watch advertisement.
"A crown for every achievement." — Hans Wilsdorf's slogan, written in 1925, still in use a century later.
The Perpetual rotor — the automatic winding mechanism that has made every Rolex self-winding since 1931 — arrived a few years later. By the 1950s the firm had launched, in quick succession, the Submariner (1953), the Explorer (1953), the GMT-Master (1954), the Day-Date (1956), and the Milgauss (1956). Almost the entire vocabulary of modern sports watches was set down in those four years, and it has not changed since.
The four references that matter
- The Submariner (ref. 6204, 1953) — the first dive watch rated to one hundred metres, and the template for every dive watch that came after. Worn by James Bond from 1962 to 1989.
- The Daytona (ref. 6239, 1963) — built for racing, ignored for a decade, then made priceless by Paul Newman's wrist. The "Paul Newman" exotic dial reference sold for $17.75 million in 2017.
- The Day-Date (ref. 6511, 1956) — the President. The first watch to spell out the day of the week in full. Worn by every American president from Eisenhower to Reagan.
- The GMT-Master (ref. 6542, 1954) — built at Pan Am's request for the new transatlantic jet pilots. Two time zones, a rotating bezel, and a 24-hour hand that has changed Rolex catalogues for seventy years.
The foundation
When Wilsdorf's wife died in 1944, he placed the entire company into a Geneva charitable foundation. He died in 1960, leaving no children. The Hans Wilsdorf Foundation has owned Rolex ever since. The firm answers to no shareholders, files no public accounts, and has never been sold. Its profits — estimated by the Morgan Stanley analyst LuxeConsult at over CHF eleven billion annually — go in part to the foundation's charitable work, and in part to a level of vertical integration that no rival can quite match. Rolex makes its own gold. It grows its own gem-grade sapphire crystals. It machines its own cases on the same site, in the same building, where it cuts its own movement plates.
The market, 2026
Rolex is the index. When the watch market boomed in 2021 and 2022, it was Rolex that boomed loudest — steel Daytonas reaching $50,000 on the grey market, four times retail. When the market corrected through 2023 and 2024, it was Rolex that gave back most. By the spring of 2026 the brand has stabilised: the Bloomberg Subdial Watch Index shows Rolex prices up roughly eight per cent year-on-year, with the Daytona 116500LN now trading in the low thirties against a retail price of $15,100. The waiting lists at authorised dealers have not, however, gone away. A steel Daytona will still take you years to acquire at full sticker — which is, of course, the entire point.