Jaeger-LeCoultre Polaris
By NICHOLAS FOULKESDiving Watches
COURTESY OF JAEGER-LE COULTREperplexingly,
Voguematic
(presumably
this watch was
aimed at the
fashion-conscious
submariner). But the
most famous of all was
the Polaris.
Prototypes of the
Memovox Polaris
appeared in 1963 (left) but it
still had elements of dress watch
design about it, including
elegant dauphine hands and
applied numerals. It was not
until 1968 that the Memovox
Polaris, watertight to 200 metres
thanks to a Piquerez Compressor
System, appeared in what is, for
most familiar collectors, its
perfect expression: black dial
with bold luminous indices,
luminous hands and, of course,
the inner rotating Memovox
disc. The case was now 42mm in
diameter (huge for the time) and
this size benefited not just
legibility but audibility too, with
a triple caseback construction
intended to stop the sound being
muffled by the diver’s wetsuit.
By the 1970s, Jaeger was
sufficiently sure of its
underwater credentials to useT
he 1950s and ’60s was
the golden age of
diving and the diving
watch. It was a time when the
undersea world emerged from
millennia of mystery. Thanks to
the advances in underwater
filming and photography,
millions of people were
introduced to an exotic world
beneath the waves, made
familiar through cinema and the
pages of National Geographic.
Meanwhile, an intrepid few
donned their wetsuits, strapped
on their aqualungs and
descended into this mysterious
realm. Of course, the risk was
that, lost in contemplation of the
wonders surrounding them,
these masked and flippered
visitors would overstay their
welcome and run out of oxygen.
This is why, right at the end of
the decade in 1959, the storied
manufacture in Le Sentier
created the Memovox Deep Sea:
a self-winding diving watch with
an alarm. The idea had
originated in the marque’s U.S.office, LeCoultre Watch Inc in
New York, and its ramifications
continue to affect the Maison 60
years later.
The Memovox Deep Sea was a
perfect and purposeful
distillation of the tool watch
aesthetic and philosophy that
had developed during the 1950s.
The black bezel with inverted
triangular markers and
white numerals; rugged
case construction that, as
well as keeping water
out, kept magnetic
fields at bay; and a
“Marine”
(synthetic) strap.
Compared to
Rolex, Blancpain,
Omega and others,
Jaeger-LeCoultre
was a late arrival
underwater but, during
the 1960s, it made up
for lost time with a tidal
wave of diver-specific
timekeepers called:
Dolphin, Barracuda, Shark,
Master Mariner and, somewhatAbove right:
Jaeger-LeCoultre
Polaris Date.
Near right: 1963
Memovox Polaris.
Below, from left:
vintage Memovox
Polaris II advert;
vintage Master
Mariner Deep Sea
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