Why Does the Submariner Bezel Turn Only One Way?
A bezel that turns both ways can tell a diver they have air left when they don't. Rolex fixed it with ref. 16800 in 1979, and not until 1990 on the no-date Sub.
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Because a bezel that turns both ways can kill you. If a two-way bezel gets knocked clockwise during a dive, it under-reports how long you've been down, and a diver reads it as time in hand they don't actually have. A one-way bezel can only ever err toward surfacing early.
How does a dive bezel actually work?
It's a timer, and a deliberately simple one.
The bezel carries sixty minute graduations and a marker at the twelve position. Before you go in, you rotate the marker anticlockwise until it lines up with the minute hand. From then on the minute hand reads your elapsed time straight off the bezel scale. No battery, no electronics, nothing to fail at depth. The serrated edge exists so it can be turned with cold hands or gloves. Set it before you enter the water, not once you're in it.
What was wrong with the original Submariner bezel?
When the Submariner arrived in the 1950s the bezel turned freely in both directions, and that turned out to be the flaw in an otherwise excellent idea.
Underwater, a bezel gets bumped. It catches on a line, a hull, a piece of kit, and it moves. On a bidirectional bezel it can move either way, and one of those ways is dangerous. Knocked clockwise, the marker advances toward the minute hand and the watch shows less elapsed time than has actually passed. A diver checking it believes they've been down twenty minutes when they've been down thirty. On a dive where remaining air and decompression obligations are both counted in minutes, that error runs in the exact direction you cannot afford.
Make the bezel turn one way only, anticlockwise, and the failure mode inverts. Every accidental knock now shows more elapsed time than has really passed. The diver believes they have less time than they do and heads up early. The watch can still be wrong. It just can't be wrong in the direction that hurts you.
When did the Submariner get a unidirectional bezel?
Later than most people assume, and at different times depending on the model.
The date Submariner changed first, with the reference 16800 introduced around
- The no-date Submariner carried on with a bidirectional bezel for another
decade, and didn't get the one-way ratchet until the reference 14060 arrived in
- So if you're handling a 5513 or a 1680, that bezel spins both ways, and it
is supposed to. It isn't a fault and it doesn't need correcting.
That matters when you're buying vintage. A "fixed" bidirectional bezel on an early Sub means somebody has replaced parts, and originality is most of the value on those references.
Does anyone still dive with one?
Dive computers do everything a bezel does and a great deal more, so the bezel isn't anybody's primary instrument now.
It's still a decent backup, and plenty of divers treat it as exactly that, because a computer has a battery and a mechanical watch doesn't. Mostly, though, it's a reminder that these watches were designed to solve a real problem for people whose lives depended on the answer. Rolex just happened to solve it handsomely enough that the rest of us wanted one.
So what do you make of the model and its bezel?
