It’s one of the hidden gems best known to lovers of diving: a rare piece, a great backstory and a dash of French national pride. In the specialist field of watch collectors, everybody’s heard of the Triton Spirotechnique, a French dive watch first produced in 1963 which (according to the catalogues of the day) had the cheek to retail for more than a Rolex! Not by much, but by a few French francs nevertheless, and that made all the difference: the Triton’s list price was 682.50 francs, while that of the Rolex was 670 francs. Just a couple of francs were enough to enshrine an aspiration, a rallying cry and a huge amount of chutzpah.
Impeccable Credentials
The Triton was designed in 1962 by Jean-René Parmentier (1921- 1998), a former French Air Force colonel with a keen interest in watchmaking, for a company named Spirotechnique founded in 1946 by the legendary Commandant Cousteau with Air Liquide. Based in Carros, near Nice, the firm still exists today and is now known by the name of its flagship product, Aqua Lung.
Parmentier lodged the patent for the hallmark crown guard, designed to secure the crown and thus prevent potentially catastrophic diving accidents as a result of incorrect adjustments leading to decompression stops not being properly timed.
The Triton was marketed from 1963 through until the early 1970s and sold only in dive shops, marking it out as highly specific and also accounting for its rarity. The timepiece’s crown at 12 o’clock and the articulated crown guard secured to the case made it recognisable at first glance. Rather than being motivated by a desire to be aesthetically pleasing, this singular and stylistically daring design was simply intended to prevent diving accidents caused by interference with the crown.
The Triton was one of the first dive watches to withstand dives to depths of up to 200 metres, as a result of which it was used by several navies, including the French Navy. This model was manufactured in France, using an ETA base movement.
Revival
In late 2015, Jean-Sébastien Coste and Philippe Friedmann decided to relaunch the Triton brand and its iconic timepiece. The Spirotechnique trademark was still registered and used for diving equipment, meaning it was no longer available. Instead, the two partners chose a new name: Subphotique. Literally, this refers to depths beyond which there is no light from the surface, where divers are in the dark: in other words, at the depths to which the new edition could easily descend — as deep as 500 metres.
Designed with precision and hand-assembled by the best Swiss watchmaking artisans, the new Triton still features the crown at 12 o’clock and the characteristic crown guard. In addition, it now has a helium valve for ascents via a hyperbaric chamber.
The diameter of the watch has been increased from 37mm to 41mm, but apart from that it retains all the original styling, including the so-called ‘table’ steel case, i.e. one that’s pretty much flat. The 60-step bezel preserves the original typeface, with larger fonts for the tens than for the units. Having the crown at 12 o’clock means the Subphotique can be worn equally comfortably on either wrist, a rarity in the world of dive watches. The new version is powered by an automatic Soprod A10-2 movement with a power reserve of 42 hours. In 2015, the first edition of the new Subphotique went on sale at a price of €4,890.
This year GMT Magazine and WorldTempus have embarked on the ambitious project of summarising the divers watch since 2000 in The Millennium Watch Book - Divers watch, a big, beautifully laid out coffee table book. This article is an extract. The Millennium Watch Book - Divers watch is available in both French and English here:
