Rolex
GMT Master (1954)Founded in 1905 by Hans Wilsdorf and Alfred Davis in London as Wilsdorf and Davis, Rolex SA is a Swiss luxury watchmaker. In 1915 the company name Rolex was registered and in 1919 Rolex moved its operations to Geneva, Switzerland. In its long history of innovative and successful watch designs, Rolex had many firsts including being the first company to offer a wristwatch to display two time zones at once. This feature is called GMT, which stands for Greenwich Mean Time also known as Coordinated Universal Time.
Launched in 1954, the Rolex GMT Master was originally developed for Pan Am Airways, who wanted to provide its crews with a dual time watch. The original 1954 ref. 6542 is highly collectable, so Wikiconic would nominate the ref. 1675 (as pictured above) for being the prettiest and most iconic GMT around.
In the early 1980s Rolex released the GMT Master II, which carries the extra feature of an independently adjustable quickset hour.
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