1969 Movado Super Sub Sea 300, automatic movement cal. 138 (base Zenith 2552 PC). Black dial with date at 3 and bidirectional Bakelite bezel.

Movado is an American luxury watch brand best known for its Museum Watch designed in 1947. Movado was originally founded in 1881 in Switzerland by Achilles Ditesheim. In 1983, the company was purchased by Gedalio Grinberg, a Cuban-born Jew who fled Fidel Castro’s Marxist Revolution in 1960 with his family.

The first ever specialized diving watches were the Panerai, used by the Italian frogmen in the Second World War. Actually they were Rolex 3646s with special dials made by Panerai.

Right after WWII, two French combat diving corps started to search for a military grade diving watch, big and easy to read underwater, hermetically sealed and capable to absorb shocks – this helped Blancpain to develop the legendary Fifty Fathoms introduced in 1953. The transformation of the simple water resistant watch to the tool diver watch happened at that exact point. The next year Rolex launched perhaps the most famous diver watch of them all, the Rolex Submariner; from that point most of the Swiss companies started to shift their attention towards the sea, trying to produce reliable underwater-capable wristwatches.