.JPG "Rolex Trench Watch circa 1915")
Status: Not Available – SOLD
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Considering this Rolex trench watch is over 100 years old the condition is great but as one would expect with these porcelain dial watches there are several age lines and blemishes on the dial, see photos which are highly magnified. The case is sterling silver, Rolex name is signed on movement which has just been serviced as is working very well. Photos are not actual size of watch, the case measures 33 mm across (not including crown) x 36 mm lug to lug and is fit with a new leather bracelet. Read about history of trench watch Shortly before WWI, a young man named Hans Wilsdorf, a successful London watch exporter, felt the world existed on a bland diet of pocket watches. He quit his lucrative position because, among other reasons, he had a hunch about a newfangled “wristlet” or wrist watch for men. Forming the partnership of Wilsdorf and Davis in 1905, he bet everything he had on the potential popularity of a man’s watch worn on the wrist. The company, which would become known as Rolex, SA, was founded, in large part, to create and popularize this vision of a high-grade man’s wristlet watch.
World War I confirmed the hunch of Wilsdorf and Davis, as intensified warfare seemed to make fishing around in one’s pocket for a watch a bit too time-consuming and thus the men’s WWI trench “wristlet” was born — not out of fashion but of sheer necessity.