Where to Sell Rolex GMT-Master Watch | High Price Purchase | JEWEL CAFE

The history of Rolex begins in London. It is said that there are currently some 600 Swiss watchmaking companies, many of which were established more than 100 years ago. However, only a handful of these have maintained operations uninterrupted to the present day. One such company is Rolex, whose founder Hans Wilsdorf was born in Bavaria, Germany in 1881. At the tender age of 12, he lost both his parents, dropped out of school, and began working for Cuno Korten, a Swiss watchmaker in La Chaux-de-Fonds. There, he was tasked with the export of English watches, which allowed him to develop his business acumen from a young age. In 1903, he moved to London at the age of 22, and two years later in 1905, he founded Wilsdorf & Davis, the predecessor of Rolex. Five years later, in search of "a creative and easily-pronounceable word", he renamed the company to the Rolex brand which we all know today. In 1910, he entered into a partnership involving watch movements with Aegler, a Swiss company skilled in the manufacture of precision instruments, and obtained the highest level of certification from the Official Swiss Chronometer Testing Institute (COSC).

In 1914, Rolex was awarded the highest recognition from the Kew Observatory. Hans Wilsdorf's next goal was to develop a sturdy case capable of protecting the watch’s movement from dust and moisture, so in 1926, in cooperation with Oyster Watch Co., he developed and patented a case made of hollowed-out metal and a screw-in crown. Thus the Rolex Oyster was born, Rolex’s trademark mechanism that remains to this day. A certain legendary event made the Rolex Oyster famous across the world: in 1927, a stenographer from London by the name of Mercedes Gleitze achieved the amazing feat of swimming across the Strait of Dover in 15 hours and 15 minutes, and she did so while wearing a Rolex Oyster on her wrist.

The fact that the Rolex was able to withstand such extreme conditions proved the incredible water resistance of the Oyster case, which in turn prompted the accelerated development of waterproof watches among other manufacturers. The success of the Rolex Oyster made a name for Rolex worldwide for its watchmaking technology, and the company next turned its attention towards developing a self-winding watch. In 1931, Rolex produced the very first wristwatch to feature a 360-degree full-rotation self-winding mechanism, thereby overcoming the biggest issue with automatic winding up to that point, which was the poor efficiency of the winding mechanism. This technology dramatically improved the winding efficiency, further augmenting Rolex's innovative capabilities.

The integration of this mechanism of perpetual movement into the prized Rolex Oyster produced the Oyster Perpetual, fondly nicknamed "the Bubbleback" in the antique market today because the rotor for winding the mainspring is positioned over the movement, causing the watch to be unusually thick as the back was rounded like a bubble to accommodate the rotor. In 1945, another revolutionary invention was added to the Oyster Perpetual: the Datejust. As the name suggests, the date display automatically rolls forward each day at midnight, which was a groundbreaking mechanism at the time. These three major inventions — the Oyster case of 1926, the Perpetual mechanism of 1931, and the Datejust mechanism of 1945 — mark the perfection of Rolex's practical watch design.