Ref. 6512: the Oyster that gave up its rotor

Eighteen-karat yellow gold, thirty-four millimetres, a silver sunburst dial with applied gold markers and solid gold dauphine hands. Subsidiary seconds at six. The crown is original and signed. Turn it over and the case back is not sitting on top of the case but set down into it, knurled around the rim, flush enough that the finished watch measures about nine millimetres through.

Rolex built the Veriflat from 1954 to 1962, a short life for a Rolex reference. Ref. 6512 exists because the Oyster case had a thickness problem, and Rolex solved it the way you solve a thickness problem: it took something out. The caliber 1000 is the automatic caliber 1030 with the rotor removed. What remains is a hand-wound movement 3.45 millimetres thick carrying eighteen jewels. The recessed back is there so that movement can lie flat while the screw-down crown stays exactly where it was. The two things Rolex is known for having invented are a waterproof case and a self-winding rotor, and this is the reference where the second was given up to flatten the first.

This example is dated 1960. The case shows minimal wear and the seller describes the dial as virtually flawless. There is no luminous material anywhere on it. An Oyster case is a promise about water, and nobody was proposing to read this one in the dark. The case back carries what it calls nominal wear, which on a component recessed below the surrounding metal is roughly what geometry would predict. It comes on a Rolex lizard strap with a gold plaque buckle and nothing else. No box, no papers, no service record — the watch is sixty-six years old and no document says who has opened it, or when.

One thing the listing does not settle. On ref. 6512 the line above the subsidiary seconds can read Precision or it can read Officially Certified Chronometer, and both are correct and original, because the difference is whether that particular movement was sent for certification rather than anything about how it was built. The listing does not quote the dial. So the specimen is either a chronometer or it is not, and the honest position is that the photographs would have to answer it.

Sotheby’s sold a ref. 6512 in New York in 2005, 18k gold with a champagne matte dial, applied baton indexes and subsidiary seconds, its movement catalogued as a nickel lever with eighteen jewels adjusted to heat, cold, isochronism and five positions. The catalogue described the case as a tonneau water-resistant-type case. It is a careful phrase and it does not contain the word Oyster. This specimen is being asked at eleven thousand dollars.

What the Veriflat records is a decade in which Rolex was doing two incompatible things at once. Through the 1950s it was making the Oyster survive deeper water, and in the middle of that it also built one that survived being thin, by removing the mechanism that made an Oyster worth winding by itself. Eight years later it stopped.