Combined with the very small 5.3mm crown, this watch is believed to have been water resistant to 100 meters, though there is one known early advertisement out there that claims a 200m depth rating. First off, the case is still relatively thin compared to later models.
Looking at the reference 6204, you can clearly tell that the watch is a Submariner, but a number of the key traits are slightly different. These earliest pieces are actually dated to late 1953 by serial number and the stamp on the inside caseback, with the earliest pieces showing "II.53" production timing. Typical literature will tell you that the Submariner was first launched in 1954, but that's just when Rolex officially announced the watch and started marketing it. This is it: The very first watch to say "Submariner" on the dial. To make this all possible, we teamed up with Eric Wind, longtime HODINKEE collaborator and founder of Wind Vintage, who tapped deep into the vintage Rolex collector community to drum up more than three dozen truly world class watches for us to shoot and study. Once we get into five-digit reference numbers, sapphire crystals, and other technical innovations, we get into squarely modern watches, which are a tale for another time. All of the watches here have four-digit reference numbers and acrylic crystals. As you'd expect though, we had to set some boundaries for ourselves: We are only covering vintage Submariners here, starting with the first proper 1953 Submariner and working our way up through the last of the classic ref. We thought it was about time that we break things down and make the whole range of Submariners a little easier to understand. There have been well over a dozen distinct references of the Submariner, with up to a few hundred total variants depending on how thinly you want to start sub-dividing individual references based on dial text, lume plots, and more. Despite all of that though, the Submariner is an often-misunderstood watch.
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