Rene-Paul Jeanneret was one of the most important executives at Rolex Geneva in the company's most fruitful period, the 1950s and 60s. His official title was that of Public Relations Director; but he was so much more than that, he involved himself in many aspects of the company's activities including inventing watches; although his name appears on none of the Rolex patents from that period. An active sportsman in many fields including skiing and the newly introduced skin diving; in the early 1950s he came up with the concept of "tool" watches. This was the idea of a watch specifically designed for practitioners of an individual sport or activity. The results of this concept appeared on the Rolex stand at the 1954 Basle Watch Fair in three forms; the Explorer for sportsmen, the Submariner for divers and the Turn-O-Graph for businessmen. The watches all proved to be great successes and so it was no surprise when the world's largest airline Pan-Am wanted a watch that would enable their pilots to keep track of time in two locations; it was to Jeanneret that they turned.
Working in conjunction with Pan-Am.'s Captain Frederick Libby (a decorated World War II veteran and one of the airlines most respected navigators), Jeanneret came up with the idea of a watch with an additional hour hand revolving just once every 24 hours and a rotatable bezel marked with those same 24 hours. The watch itself was a typical Rolex product, it was simply a regular 6202 "Turn-O-Graph" with a different bezel and the 1030 movement normally fitted to Turn-O-Graphs had an additional 24 hour driving wheel and a calendar disk; this, and the fact that the movement was now chronometer certified, allowed Rolex to give the movement a new reference number, 1065. The external look of the watch was very similar to the contemporary Turn-O-Graph and Submariner; it was still quite a slim watch and without the crown protecting "shoulders", looked considerably smaller than the current model. The GMT Master was also important in that it was one of the first Rolex model to feature the new "Cyclops" lens from the introduction of the watch. These first GMT models (ref. 6542) are immediately recognised by the bright plastic bezel insert. This plastic bezel insert was the first item to be changed in 1956, giving way to a metal insert with the numbers now screen-printed. These new bezels were less likely to crack than the earlier plastic ones but were much more likely to fade in bright sunlight.
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