Rolex

Rolex is a watch design and manufacturing company based in Geneva, Switzerland. They design watches for a variety of professional uses while also being considered a major luxury watch brand. Rolex has been a long time developer of timepieces and has patented numerous time keeping devices, technologies, and mechanisms.

As a brand, Rolex is present in more than one hundred countries and produces over 800,000 watches a year. Some of their most popular watches are Air King, Cosmograph Daytona, Datejust, Day Date, Explorer, GMT Master, President, Sea Dweller, Submariner, and the Yacht-Master. As the names imply, Rolex designs watches for specific purposes, including racing, aviation, diving and more.

The company is led by CEO Jean-Frederic Dufour and is owned by the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation since 1960. Rolex brand includes subsidiary Tudor.

Hans Wilsdorf and Alfred Davis founded Rolex in London in 1905, though the "Rolex" name was not registered until 1908. Hans Wilsdorf was originally very focused on creating wristwatches, and became an early manufacturer of the new (at the time) devices. Rolex moved to Geneva in 1919, and was officially registered as Montres Rolex S.A., in 1920. The first waterproof watch, the Oyster, was released by Rolex in 1926, and was worn in Mercedes Gleitze's swim across the English channel in 1927.

Rolex patented the first self-winding mechanism with a Perpetual rotor in 1932, one of many steps in the development of the automatic watch. In 1945, Rolex release the Datejust, the first self-winding wristwatch to also tell the date. Throughout the 1950's and sixties, Rolex developed a variety of watches for professional uses, aviation, climbing, diving, racing etc. In 1936, Hans Wilsdorf took over the watch company Tudor, making it a subsidiary of Rolex. When Hans Wilsdorf died in 1960, he left the company to the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation, a Swiss charitable trust he had established 1944; the company is still privately held.