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As a research scientist with a passion for fine timepieces, I have always been on the lookout for the watch that would best match my work and life passions. If you also fit that category, then look no further than the Rolex Milgauss, and especially the unique anniversary edition reference 116400GV (“glass verte”) with the green sapphire glass. It is a watch with a unique history that stands out from an all too common Rolex lineup and that was designed for scientists… Let’s explore why that is.
While I will not give you a full history of the Rolex Milgauss, I want to brush on the important highlights. The Rolex web site and various blog posts do a thorough job of documenting the history, in particular this post is one of the better ones I have found on its history.
In a nutshell, the Rolex Milgauss was introduced in the late 50’s when electricity, electronics, aeronautics, and nuclear engineering was bringing about what we now call the technology and information revolution. As a species, we had just discovered the power of the atom, we were finally in a position to leave mother earth (albeit for short periods of time), and the amount of innovations around transmitting, storing, and transforming information, created a series of revolutions that would forever change mankind.
As a consequence of this flood of innovation, scientists (and generally everyone) were increasingly being exposed to magnetic fields. Not only from the instruments used but also from everyday appliances such as TV sets, radios, and the many new electrified appliances that were making their way into households. You don’t need to know Maxwell’s equations to know that an electrical current and a magnetic field are two sides of the same “coin” and that one can easily be converted into the other. The German mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss was one of the first to explore this space and thus, in his honor, the measure of magnetic flux density is a Gauss. Today, other measurements like the Tesla and ampere/meter (1000G = 0.1T = 80,000A/m) are more commonly used.
Of course, the result of being exposed to so much accidental or intentional magnetic fields is that anything you have on you that is sensitive to such fields will be affected. You also don’t need to know much about the inner workings of a mechanical watch to realize that a magnetic field is one of its sworn enemies. Briefly, mechanical watches (even the best ones) use a balance wheel containing a hairspring that is used to regulate the movement, it’s the watch’s heartbeat, if you may. Mess with the hairspring or balance wheel and you will end up with a watch that runs too fast or too slow… Therefore, in situations where the watch is exposed to a magnetic field, components of the watch can be magnetized and thus be disrupted.
It is in this context that various manufacturers started exploring how to achieve watches that could resist such fields. IWC was the first to release a widely available watch resistant to magnetic fields with its aptly named Ingénieur model. Not to be outdone, in that same time-frame, Rolex also released its own magnetic-resistant watch: the Rolex Milgauss (from the French “mille” and Gauss, thus resistant to 1000 Gauss). James Stacey recently covered a set of newly announced Ingénieur pieces by IWC, to be released in 2013: the year of the Ingénieur for IWC.
