Rolex: The Impossible Collection

Product Information

The brand became famous for precision during a time when most wristwatches weren’t reliable. Athletes, aviators, deep-sea divers, mountain climbers, and explorers all wore Rolex watches while the company continued to innovate. It created the world’s first waterproof watch, the first watch with a self-winding mechanism, and the first watch to fly over Mount Everest, as well as the first watch to display the date and day of the week. The history of Rolex is rooted in the visionary spirit of its founder, Hans Wilsdorf. In 1905, young Wilsdorf founded a company in London for the distribution of timepieces, but his true dream was to produce wristwatches?in their infancy at the time, and not very precise?that would be technically durable and reliable, and supremely elegant. The company first concentrated on producing the highest quality movements, and this quest for precision rapidly led to the first wristwatch in the world to receive the Swiss Certificate of Chronometric Precision, granted by the Official Watch Rating Centre in Bienne in 1910. Four years later, Kew Observatory in Great Britain awarded a Rolex watch a class A certificate, a distinction that had been previously reserved exclusively for marine chronometers.

The history of Rolex is rooted in the visionary spirit of its founder, Hans Wilsdorf. In 1905, young Wilsdorf founded a company in London for the distribution of timepieces, but his true dream was to produce wristwatches—in their infancy at the time, and not very precise—that would be technically durable and reliable, and supremely elegant. The company first concentrated on producing the highest quality movements, and this quest for precision rapidly led to the first wristwatch in the world to receive the Swiss Certificate of Chronometric Precision, granted by the Official Watch Rating Centre in Bienne in 1910. Four years later, Kew Observatory in Great Britain awarded a Rolex watch a class A certificate, a distinction that had been previously reserved exclusively for marine chronometers. Today, Alex Assouline, the son of Prosper and Martine, heads Assouline Publishing. Under his guidance, the brand developed a lucrative new branch that is focused on curating private libraries for homes, offices, hotels and other commercial properties.p>Assouline Releases Another Installment of ‘The Impossible Collection of Watches’; By: Yoni Yardeni, HiConsumption Online (USA), December 2022

Selected by specialist Fabienne Reybaud, each of the exceptional Rolex watch models in Rolex: The Impossible Collection showcase the most valuable and technically innovative models the luxury watchmaker has produced, including watches never seen in print before. The watches include some never seen in print, including the first Rolex wristwatch (early 1900s), the first Oyster Perpetual (1931), and an Explorer worn during Sir Edmund Hillary’s expedition to the summit of Mt. Everest (1953). Other watches range to the Submariner worn by actor George Lazenby in the James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and a recently auctioned franken as well.For this update to the 2014 original edition, British historian and journalist Nicholas Foulkes has selected the 100 breakthrough timepieces developed since the advent of the twentieth century, weighing the virtues of rarity, costliness, innovative functions, historical importance, grand provenance and pleasing design. The watch—a microcosm of hundreds of minute components interacting harmoniously with each other and bound within a case of precious metal—has the power to awaken emotions, excite the imagination and inspire the same passion as great art. Beautiful timepieces invite us to join a story, and the narrative that these 100 examples unfold is that of one of the most exciting and dynamic periods in human history. Highly anticipated Assouline titles, such as Yves Saint Laurent: The Impossible Collection, Chinese Art: The Impossible Collection and Art Deco Style, are published with consistency every year. While books remain at the forefront of Assouline, the publishing house has also expanded into producing alluring decorative objects and furnishings for the home.