Welcome to Watches You Should Know, a biweekly column highlighting important or little-known watches with interesting backstories and unexpected influence. This week: the Rolex Explorer.
The Explorer is a Rolex sport watch in its purest form. It’s unflashy but recognizable, and it presents the features, design language and history that underpins multiple icons of the brand. Most of all, however, it’s known as the watch that accompanied the first humans confirmed to summit Mount Everest. (Sort of.)
The story of Everest and the Explorer is important and exciting, but it requires some unpacking and qualification right up front: Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of the world’s tallest mountain in 1953, and Rolex had sponsored the expedition and provided a watch. Just like when Rolex placed its waterproof Oyster watch on the wrist of Mercedes Gleitze for her 1923 swim across the English Channel, it was a brilliant marketing and publicity coup.
The Explorer’s role in the 1953 expedition has been so mythologized, however, it’s also been closely scrutinized, as nerdy watch collectors are want to do. Some have questioned what watch Hillary was actually wearing the moment he stepped foot on the peak, as he also had his own Smiths De Luxe watch with him — but there’s no way to confirm one way or the other. Both watches made the trip and both companies prominently advertised it. (Interestingly, it would seem that Norgay chose to take his own gold Rolex Datejust on the British 1953 expedition — one that he received as a gift from the company following an expedition in 1952). Which watches were actually on the climbers’ wrists at the summit is still cause for fierce debate.
