Antiques: Is this the world's most famous watch?
OK, let's get serious today. We're going to put the nickels and dimes aside and talk about the Rolex Daytona, among the world's most coveted watches. At $4.5 billion in annual sales, Rolex obviously sells a lot of watches, and we've covered some of this ground before.
Nonetheless, once in a while we get in something of such notoriety that I have to revisit the backstory. There are a lot of watches out there, but this one casts its own shadow. Let's get to it.
By the 1930s, Rolex was already a substantial force in the timekeeping business when it started to play with a multi-register chronograph. Basically, a chronograph is a combination wristwatch and stopwatch with the main dial indicating the time of day and one or more little sub-dials measuring the passing of seconds or minutes. Why anyone other than pilots, race car drivers and a few other people would need such a watch remains a mystery to me, but what do I know?
Anyway, Rolex experimented with the design and functionality of its chronographs for three decades before introducing the Daytona model in the mid-1960s. The introductory price was $210, or a little more than $2,000 in today's dollars. Not cheap, but a screaming bargain relative to what was to come.
Another oddity of the watch business is that watches are often better known by the type of movements they contain rather than their model names. And for some obscure reason, movements are designated a "reference number" at their inception and go by that number ever after.
The point of all this is that the reference number for Daytona's immediate predecessor was 6238, but it wasn't until ref. 6239 was introduced that the Daytona name came into being. And before the name "Daytona" was introduced — a nod to Rolex's long-time sponsorship of the Daytona racetrack — their predecessors were known as Rolex Chronographs and then Rolex Cosmographs. Well, who cares, right? You might be surprised.
Anyway, Rolex continued to fiddle around with dial colors, bezel markings and brand name placement over the years, but there were also some consequential improvements. A self-winding (or "automatic") movement was introduced in 1988, prior to which all Daytonas had to be wound daily by hand.
In addition, all the small circular crowns on the watch's right side that allow for time-setting and stopwatch functionality were threaded so that they could be screwed down and thus made more waterproof. But what really gained the Daytona worldwide fame was an auction in 2017 during which actor and race car driver Paul Newman's Daytona was sold for a mind-boggling $17.8 million. Yes, dollars. For a watch.
Since that time, Rolex Daytona pricing has basically gone crazy, especially for those with the same or similar exotic dials as the Newman watch. The waiting list for limited edition models can stretch out for years, and there is an active group of watch flippers who will buy and sell Daytonas just like other people do with exotic cars and houses.
After a ridiculous post-COVID surge, Rolex prices have generally come down in recent months, but you should still plan on a hefty five-figure investment if you want a popular model. Buyers beware, however, as Asian knockoffs have improved to the point of near undetectability. All the same, authentic Daytonas have become an asset class all by themselves. And rather than a gold bar that spends its life in a safe, a Daytona is something you can actually use.
Mike Rivkin and his wife, Linda, are long-time residents of Rancho Mirage. For many years, he was an award-winning catalogue publisher and has authored seven books, along with countless articles. Now, he's the owner of Antique Galleries of Palm Springs. His antiques column appears Sundays in The Desert Sun. Want to send Mike a question about antiques? Drop him a line at info@silverfishpress.com.
This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Antiques: Is this the world's most famous watch?
