They say that “There is no accident that would stop your Rolex that wouldn’t kill you first”. Actually maybe it’s just me that says that and if Rolex wants to use the slogan they can cite me every time – and maybe make a Cosmograph for which it is true.
For me, the meteorite face of the cosmograph is especially evocative of the time when I stood with Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe and his assistant in his laboratory as a meteorite was cut open to look for signs of alien life that the professor believed might be trapped there. My interests here and in how solutions for the Drake Equation might give us unique insights into extra-terrestrial life led Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe to propose me as a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The face of the Rolex meteorite in the picture comes from the “Gibeon” Meteorite, a Class IVA meteorite, a four and a half billion year old piece of molten planetary core, was first reported in 1838 by Captain J.E. Alexander. Scientists believe that the Gibeon meteorite fell to Earth in prehistoric times, landing in the Namibian desert near the town of Gibeon along the east side of the Great Fish River in Great Namaqualand, Namibia.
The Gibeon meteorite most likely originated as a piece of molten planetary core, which was released when the planet broke apart billions of years ago. The meteorite then made its way slowly through space, traveling for millions of years until it landed on Earth. As the molten meteorite traveled, it cooled in the vacuum of space. While slowly cooling, the famous Widmanstätten pattern (named after Alois von Beckh Widmanstätten) formed, leaving the unique ribbons of crystalized iron and nickel composites that are revealed when the material is cut into slices. This pattern is virtually impossible to reproduce in a lab setting, making it all that more enjoyable.
And of course a Rolex Cosmograph is in part one of the few chances the modern man gets to strap an articulated piece of flexible armour plate on their forearm and it’s rather charming to have a purely mechanical device that hums and vibrates on your wrist more like a tiny mammal’s heart than a machine. It’s it’s quite comforting to be carrying enough portable wealth on your wrist to support you for a year in some parts of the world if you ever had to (or in my case after being hit by a major cybercrime I was able to at least use the sale of my Rolex to pay off my team members to give them a soft landing after funds were cleared out by hackers – exactly the type of buffer I intended it to serve).
The instinct that makes an automatic chronograph compelling to the most discerning is the very same selective instinct that has driven humans to the top of the evolutionary tree – the drive to make precise perfect functional machines displaced massive muscles and brow ridges in evolutionary selection as fire and bifacial Lithic tools replaced grunting and banging things with rocks.