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# The Deepest Company in the World
- URL: https://www.itsabouttime.email/the-deepest-company-in-the-world/
- Published: 2026-10-03T20:50:33.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-03T20:50:33.000Z
- Author: Vuk Radic
- Tags: The Caseback

On the fifth of March, 1968, two men climbed through the hatch of a steel cylinder on the southern edge of Marseille and listened to it being dogged shut behind them with a stoic look but a bit of trepidation in their chests. The cylinder belonged to a company that was not yet seven years old and that most of France had never heard of. The younger of the two men owned it. Henri-Germain Delauze was 38, compact and permanently sunburned, a man who looked like he had spent more times on boats than in buildings, and he had spent the previous weeks assuring his own engineers that what they were about to do to him was just fine. If not fine, then surely survivable. The older man, Ralph Werner Brauer, was a physiologist from Duke University who had fled Berlin with his widowed father in 1937, got a doctorate at 21, worked on radiation for the American navy, and had now flown to the south of France with electrodes implanted in his scalp to see what will happen. White bandages held them in place. Wires ran from his head, through the wall, to a bank of instruments where men in short sleeves sat smoking and watching needles.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/comex-5.jpg)

Henri-Germain Delauze and Ralph Werner Brauer testing the limits of the human body at depth

Inside the chamber all they had at their disposal was two bunks, a porthole the size of a saucer, a toilet behind a curtain, and a unnerving hiss. The hiss was helium. Over about two hours it pushed the pressure up to the equivalent of 335 meters of seawater, deeper than anyone had been taken on a breathing gas. Somewhere past 200 meters their voices on the intercom went thin and high. You know the sound, it makes you laugh at every birthday party that someone grabs a helium balloon and imitates Donald Duck. But the technicians outside, who had heard it before, did not laugh. 

Passing 200 meters, Brauer's hands soon started to shake. He had come to Marseille for exactly this. British navy researchers had first seen the tremor three years earlier, and some of them believed it marked the floor of human diving, the depth below which a man would simply stop working. Brauer wanted to feel it inside his own body. He felt the shaking, and the drowsiness that came with it, and the fog that settled over simple arithmetic, and he made notes. After a few minutes at depth the compression was reversed. It took three days to bring the two men back to the pressure of the room outside, where it was still March and the mistral was still blowing off the hills.

In the photograph taken through the porthole, one Brauer is wearing a large Omega. He had no reason to look at it, since every second of the dive was being timed by the men outside. The watch was there because Omega had sent it, and Omega had sent it because this small contractor in Marseille had started doing things to men and metal that nobody else was doing, and a Swiss watch company wanted to be in the room when something broke.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/comex-11.jpg)

Nine years later, one of the same company's divers lost his watch on a job. It was a Seiko. Delauze replaced it himself, with a steel Rolex Submariner that had a small extra valve on the left flank of the case and the number 793 engraved across the back between the words Rolex and Comex. The diver wore it until he left the company in 1981\. Then he put it in a drawer with his diving logbooks and the certificate from the Comex deep-diving school and left it there. Nobody serviced it. The bezel stayed bleached by salt and the crystal stayed scuffed from whatever it had been knocked against at the bottom of the Mediterranean. On July 20, 2021, the watch came out of the drawer and went to auction at Artcurial with an estimate of €60,000 to €80,000\. It sold for €318,500.

Between the bandaged scientist in the chamber and the hammer at Artcurial lies the whole history of the Compagnie Maritime d'Expertises, and of how a firm that welded pipe on the seabed ended up as a word printed on the most counterfeited watch dials in the vintage market. Most of what has been written about it starts in Geneva. It ought to start in Marseille.

## II. The Engineer from Cairanne

Delauze was born on September 17, 1929, in Cairanne, a wine village in the Vaucluse where people talk about Côtes du Rhône and frost, and where the sea is something you drive two hours to see. He trained as an engineer at the Arts et Métiers school in Aix-en-Provence and learned to dive at 20, during his military service, which turned out to be the most important thing that happened to him in uniform. By the end of 1952 he was back in the south and drifting toward the old port of Marseille, where the men around Jacques-Yves Cousteau were turning the aqualung from a wartime gadget into a lifestyle that was hard to let go of once you embraced it. He worked with them for three years. He dug on Roman wrecks off the calanques and learned what every one of those men learned, which was that the sea was enormous and almost nobody could explore its true size.

But while the diving life was someting Delauze loved, he didn't want to spend the rest of his life on the Calypso. He was looking for more. Mostly more money. Naturally, he went into heavy construction. He ran sites for Grands Travaux de Marseille, studied at Berkeley, worked in Guinea and Algeria, and supervised an immersed road tunnel under the bay of Havana. In 1959 the State Department brought him to the United States on an official visit. Somewhere in those years he arrived at a conclusion that seems obvious. The money under the surface was going to come from oil. The oil would come up through pipes and platforms, and the pipes would need men to join them, repair them and inspect them at depths where men could not yet work for more than a few minutes at a time.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/comex-2.jpg)

On October 3, 1961, while he was still employed by the national research council, Delauze registered the Compagnie Maritime d'Expertises in Marseille. He was 32\. Yuri Gagarin had circled the earth six months earlier, and while the newspapers filled up with the race into orbit, an air diver at 60 meters had about a quarter of an hour before nitrogen fogged his brain. Delauze proposed to sell the bottom of the sea to oil companies by the hour. He just wasn't sure at the time how to do it.

In 1962, the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS)—the French national research council—officially tasked Henri-Germain Delauze with founding and directing the Laboratoire des Bathyscaphes in Marseille. On July 25 of that year, a few months after the company's first invoices went out, he rode the bathyscaphe Archimède down into a trench off northeast Japan to 9,545 meters. Half a century later no Frenchman had been deeper. Between 1962 and 1967 he coordinated, with the French navy, five international campaigns into the great ocean trenches. During the same years he was hustling contracts for a diving company with a handful of employees, a rented boat and a reputation borrowed from Cousteau. The two jobs fed each other. The scientists gave him access to the pressure research nobody in industry had, and the industry gave the research a customer.

He was, by every account, impossible to keep on land. Even after the company had thousands of employees and offices on four continents, his staff learned that the reliable way to find the president was to look for whichever boat was about to put something in the water.

## III. Saturation

The trick that made Comex rich was invented by an American navy doctor named George Bond, who worked out in the late 1950s that a diver's body can only soak up so much gas. Once the tissues are full, they are full, and the decompression a man has to endure is the same whether he has been at depth for a day or a month. So the solution was simple: if you stop bringing the divers up, they don't have to go through decompression. Of course, you don't keep a diver at depth in his dive suit, just hangin out in the dark water. Simplified, the way you keep him under pressure for weeks is by having him live in a steel chamber bolted to the deck of a ship, and every morning you lock him into a pressurized bell, lower it to the job, let him work his shift, and winch him back to his bunk without ever letting the pressure drop. When the job is finished you decompress him once, slowly, over days. The American navy proved it with its SEALAB habitats. Delauze was sold on the idea, and it was off to the races.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/comex-3.jpg)

In 1965 Comex built its first bell-and-chamber system and, with a Marseillais sense of humor, named it Idéfix, after the small white dog in Astérix. That same year Xavier Fructus, who had been Cousteau's diving physician, came over as medical director, which gave the company the one thing its competitors could not buy: a doctor who already knew way too well what pressure did to a man. In 1966 Comex became known in the diving world for pulling off a job at 160 meters. This fame not just in France, but all over the world, paid dividends quickly. They were off to Greece to work at 105 meters, and then came the calls from the oil majors, then more calls.

Life in saturation was, and is, deeply strange. The chambers are kept hot, around 30 degrees, because helium pulls heat out of a body so fast that a man at normal room temperature shivers in his bunk. Food comes in through a small lock in the wall, and after a few days nothing tastes of much, so the divers pour hot sauce on everything. Everyone sounds like a cartoon duck, and the surface crew listens through an electronic unscrambler. Divers stay in the chamber for two, three, four weeks at a time, and at the end of it they sit through days of decompression with nothing to do but read and wait.

Working at depth was cool. But what was cooler? Seeing how deep they can go. And 1968 was the year the company tried to find out where the floor was. After Physalie, that experiment I described at the start, Delauze and Brauer announced something far more dangerous, a dive in the open sea, off Marseille, on hydrogen. Hydrogen is cheap and light and far less narcotic than nitrogen, and it is also the gas that burned the Hindenburg. They named the project Hydra, partly for the gas and partly for the many-headed monster, and scheduled it for May. What they didn't account for was that France would come apart heading into the summer of '68.. Students tore up the cobblestones in Paris, ten million workers went on strike, and Charles de Gaulle flew secretly to a French army base in Germany. Which meant that Hydra wasn't exactly a priority and funding was delayed. When it finally went into the water on October 28, Brauer had an ear problem at the last moment and a Comex diver named François Fallourd took his place. At 252 meters the heated suits failed, the divers came close to freezing, and the attempt was called off.

It did not matter much. Janus I, the same year, put four divers to work at 150 meters for 14 hours. In September 1970, during Janus II off the coast of Corsica, three Comex divers spent eight days going down in shifts to around 250 meters, where they connected, cut and welded a pipeline in the dark. Nobody had done real industrial work that deep before, and nobody could meet Comex depths. Two months later, in a new hyperbaric center at Pointe-Rouge on the southern edge of the city, two of the company's divers were compressed to 520 meters in a test called Physalie 5 and stayed there for an hour and 17 minutes. Comex was nine years old, basically came out of nowhere, fueled by enthusiasm of one diver, and it already owned the deepest records in the world, in the chamber and in the sea.

## IV. The Exploding Watches

Saturation solved a problem for divers and created one for watches. Helium atoms are tiny, much smaller than the hydrogen in water, and over hundreds of hours under pressure they work their way through gaskets and into a sealed case until the inside of the watch is at the same pressure as the chamber. That is harmless while working at depth. On the way up, the chamber pressure drops faster than the gas can seep back out, and at some point the crystal, the weakest part of the case, lets go with a pop. Not ideal for a dive tool.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/comex-6.jpg)

However, a fix was extremely simple and it was quickly discovered by divers. Before decompression they unscrewed their crowns and let the gas leak out by itself. But try remembering to do that after a grueling five week shift you spent in a tiny metal tube with sweaty dudes that sound like annoying children. An American navy diver named Bob Barth, a SEALAB veteran who had lost track of how many times he had heard a crystal go, thought a watch ought to do it on its own, and it shouldn't have to be a very difficult engineering task. All you needed was a little one-way valve that opened when the gas inside pushed hard enough. 

At a diving trade show in New York he described the idea to a man named T. Walker Lloyd, an archaeological diver who was about to go and excavate a wreck in Turkey and had never heard of the problem. Lloyd took the idea to Rolex. André Heiniger, who ran Rolex at the time and was a diver himself, liked Lloyd enough to hire him as the company's oceanographic consultant. A former Patek Philippe watchmaker on staff named André Zibach drew up the valve, and Rolex filed for a Swiss patent on November 6, 1967.

Omega had seen its own Seamaster 300s go pop and drew the opposite conclusion from Rolex. If helium gets into a case, keep it out of the case. From 1968 Comex was Omega's laboratory, and Omega's engineers built watches for it that look, even now, as if they were designed by men who had just seen *2001: A Space Odyssey* and were angry about it. The prototypes had no caseback at all. The movement was loaded from the front into a one-piece steel shell, the crystal was clamped down under a heavy ring, and the crown was pushed against its gaskets by a separate bolt so that winding it never twisted the seals. 

In mid-1968 Omega delivered prototypes of what would become the Seamaster 1000, which the factory privately called Ploprof 0, for Comex's chamber tests and for Hydra. Then came the Seamaster 600, the watch everyone now calls the Ploprof, from *plongeur professionnel*. Three prototypes went down with the Janus II divers off Corsica in 1970, and Omega photographed one engraved with the words JANUS II TESTED 60 ATM and put it in an advertisement. When the Physalie 5 divers came out of the chamber in November 1970, Omega gave each of them a Seamaster with an engraved caseback.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/comex-4.jpg)

The divers were polite about it. They asked Omega for a darker blue dial, which they got, because the pale one was hard to read in dark water. Privately many of them thought the Ploprof was overbuilt, a monument to the engineering department. Omega had spent enormous effort on a bezel lock that wasn't exactly useful to them and was a bit finicky. A saturation diver worked six-hour shifts while a supervisor on the surface timed his gas, his depth and his decompression to the second, so a bezel that measured 60 minutes measured nothing useful. Barth, years later, said the only real use he had found for a rotating bezel in saturation was timing boiled eggs. In a saturation system the watch had stopped being life-support equipment. It was more of a statement.

And who better to make a statement, than Rolex. In June 1968, they managed to sneak one into the Marseille chamber. While Hydra was stalled by the strikes, Brauer stayed in the city and ran more pressure tests with Comex divers, reaching 360 meters on June 11\. Some time in those weeks Rolex representatives presented him with a Sea-Dweller prototype, case number 1820177, with a one-way valve in the side and the words Gas Escape Valve punched by hand into the back, letter by letter. Officially Omega claimed the Physalie records. Unofficially, it is very likely there was a Rolex on the other wrist.

## V. A Hundred Watches

By 1971 Rolex was losing a race it badly wanted to win. Omega had been on the moon in 1969\. Now Omega was at the bottom of the Mediterranean with the most famous diving company in the world, and the Sea-Dweller, Rolex's answer, had spent four years as a prototype looking for somewhere to prove itself. The American navy had been the obvious place. SEALAB III was supposed to put teams of divers on the seabed off San Clemente Island for weeks, and Rolex handed valve-equipped prototypes to the first team. On February 17, 1969, a diver named Berry Cannon died at 185 meters when a carbon dioxide scrubber turned out to be empty, and the navy abandoned the program. 

So Rolex moved on to the next best thing. It made around 300 more prototypes and lent them to professional divers around the world in exchange for written reports. It put the Sea-Dweller on sale in late 1970, in American newspapers, as the decompressing watch, for $300, with the valve still described as patent pending. And then Heiniger went to Marseille.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/comex-8.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/comex-9.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/comex-10.jpg)

The story of what he offered comes from Delauze himself, who told it to the Rolex historian Jake Ehrlich in 2009, at 79\. Heiniger proposed to give Comex 100 watches, free, double-signed Rolex and Comex, to hand out to the company's deep divers. When one broke, Comex would send it back to Geneva, so Rolex could learn where its watches failed. Roughly every two years after that, another 200 would arrive. Delauze accepted on the spot. In his own words, he dropped Omega "immediately" when the first Rolexes arrived.

The switch happened fast enough to catch people mid-dive. In November 1971, during a test called Sagittaire 1, the Comex divers in the chamber were still wearing Ploprof prototypes. By the end of December the first batch from Geneva had arrived. There were ten of them, Sea-Dwellers with the double red text on the dial, and their casebacks were engraved Rolex Comex and numbered one to ten. Rolex, meanwhile, had begun writing to the divers who were still testing its prototypes. One of them, an American named John M. Kelly who worked on ship hulls in Singapore, received a letter from Geneva in February 1972 explaining that all future testing would be done by a single diving company the letter did not name. He was told he could keep the watch.

That same month two Comex divers spent 100 hours in the chamber at 500 meters. In May they did something better. During Physalie 6, Robert Gauret and Patrice Chemin were compressed, over seven days and three hours, to 610 meters, which was precisely the depth printed on the Sea-Dweller's dial, and stayed at that depth long enough to be photographed. Decompression took 233 hours. The Sea-Dwellers survived it, and Rolex put the dive in an advertisement almost as soon as the divers were out.

Most Comex work was nothing like Physalie 6\. The money was in pipeline jobs between 50 and 150 meters, depths where a Sea-Dweller was more watch than anyone needed. So in 1972 Rolex took the ordinary Submariner 5513, a no-date watch built in large numbers, and fitted it with the gas valve. The modified watch soon got its own reference, 5514, and it was never sold to the public. Phillips puts the total of those made at about 750\. The early ones left Geneva with a plain Submariner dial and the Comex markings only on the back. From 1974 the dials carried the company's name too, in small block capitals.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/comex-12.jpg)

The arrangement gave Rolex the right to use the Comex name in its advertising, and Rolex used it for the next three decades with great patience and very little restraint. It worked. Within a generation the Omega years had dropped out of the story almost entirely, and collectors came to believe that Rolex had built the Sea-Dweller for Comex, and that the 5514 had been its prototype. Neither is true, of course.

## VI. The Vieux-Port

In the autumn of 1973 the Arab oil embargo quadrupled the price of crude, and the North Sea, which had been a cold and expensive gamble, became the most important construction site in Europe. Hundreds of platforms went up off Scotland and Norway, every one of them standing on legs and fed by pipes that somebody had to inspect, repair and join, and Comex had been in Aberdeen since 1970\. In the years that followed the company more or less invented the industry it worked in. In 1977 it put to sea the Uncle John, the first semi-submersible dive support vessel that could hold itself in place by computer-controlled thrusters, with a saturation system built into its hull. More ships followed. By 1981 the group's turnover was the equivalent of more than €300 million a year, it ran dozens of subsidiaries, and it employed something like 2,000 to 3,000 people, among them roughly 700 divers. It was one of the ten biggest exporters in France. In 1971 Leonid Brezhnev had asked to be shown around.

Delauze built himself a house on stilts at the foot of the Fort Ganteaume, at the mouth of the old port, with a pool, a ring for a yacht and water deep enough that his small submarines could come up to the door. The building permit was issued under Gaston Defferre, the city's mayor for 33 years, and Marseille still tells the story that Defferre approved it to stop Comex from moving its head office out of town.

Along the quays of the Vieux-Port, a watchmaker named Jacques Bianchi had a workshop that looked out over the boats. He had trained at the Marseille school of watchmaking, set up on his own in 1963, and in 1974 became one of the very few Rolex-approved repairers in the city. The divers found him almost at once. They came in salt-crusted off the ships with their Submariners and Sea-Dwellers, scratched and dented, bezels faded to grey, and Bianchi opened them, dried them, replaced gaskets and sent them back out. Delauze came to him too, and so did Cousteau, and Albert Falco from the Calypso, and the freediver Jacques Mayol. Bianchi is still there. At 86 he still opens his shop on the Vieux-Port, and he says he saw the whole diving world of Marseille go past his bench, from the humblest to the most famous.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/comex-13.jpg)

To the company the watches were equipment. Each one was issued against a number engraved across the outside of the caseback, so Comex could keep a register of who had what. The 5514 was reserved for its senior divers, men with a class A rating and real responsibility on a job. The others got whatever Rolex had sent that year: Sea-Dwellers, Submariner Dates in reference 1680 and later 16800 and 168000, and in the 1980s the thicker 16660 Sea-Dweller, rated to 1,220 meters, with a sapphire crystal and a bigger valve. In 1984 a diver named Georges Arnoux was given a Submariner 16800 for ten years with the company. Nobody in that world thought the Comex name on the dial was worth much. Divers were handed their watches as gifts, or allowed to buy them for a token sum when they left, and plenty of them went to the bottom for good.

In October 1977 the company went looking for one more record, in the open sea. Janus IV was run jointly with the French navy's deep diving group, with four Comex divers and two from the navy living in saturation aboard a support ship called the Petrel off Cavalaire, on the Var coast. On the evening of October 19, while the six men lay in their chamber, Delauze came on the loudspeaker to tell them how pleased the company was. The next day Jacques Verpeaux went out of the bell, and the instruments on the surface showed him at 501 meters, where no diver had ever worked in open water. Every siren on the Petrel and on the boats around it went off. Down in the dark Verpeaux picked up a plastic slate and wrote on it, for the camera, Janus IV, 500 meters, 1647 feet. He was wearing a Sea-Dweller that had been made for the operation, and afterward Rolex had it engraved with his name, the name of the dive and the depth. Comex beat the depth itself eleven years later, on hydrogen. On a helium mixture, nobody has beaten it since.

## VII. Seven Hundred and One

The oil price collapsed in 1986, and with it the appetite of the oil companies for paying men to live at the bottom of the sea. Remotely operated vehicles, yellow robots on tethers, were getting good enough to do much of what a diver did at a fraction of the cost and none of the risk. Comex built and ran them too, but a company whose name had been made by men in helium was watching the ground move under it.

It kept setting records anyway, as if the records were the entire point of their existance. In 1988, during Hydra 8, four Comex divers and two from the French navy carried out pipeline connections at 534 meters in the Mediterranean, breathing a mixture of hydrogen, helium and oxygen the company called hydreliox. Nobody has worked deeper in open water since. Delauze had also bought the hull of a giant civilian submarine Cousteau had started and run out of money to finish, and turned it, with the French oceanographic institute, into the Saga, a working submarine with a saturation system on board, meant one day to service oil wells under the Arctic ice. I mean, these people... They had such great ideas. Insane ideas. But great ideas The Saga was launched in Marseille on February 28, 1987, with the prime minister watching. It ran its sea trials in 1991 and was laid up in a hangar at l'Estaque, where it still sits.

On November 20, 1992, a Comex diver named Théo Mavrostomos, the son of a Greek sponge diver, sat inside the hyperbaric chamber at Pointe-Rouge at a pressure equivalent to 701 meters of seawater. He had started the dive with two other men and finished the last stage alone. The whole dive, compression, stay and decompression, lasted 43 days. On his wrist, according to the Rolex historian Jake Ehrlich, was a Sea-Dweller 16600\. Thirty years on, no human being has been subjected to more pressure.

That was the summit, and the same year Delauze turned around and sold everything. Comex Services, the offshore diving business that had made the company rich, went to the Norwegian group Stolt-Nielsen for about $50 million and was merged with its subsidiary into a new company called Stolt Comex Seaway. Within a few years the Comex name had disappeared from it. Stolt Comex Seaway became Stolt Offshore, then Acergy, then part of Subsea 7\. The company that kept the Comex name in Marseille lost 80 percent of its turnover overnight and shrank to about 30 employees.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/comex-15.jpeg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/-comex-14.jpeg)

Delauze never stopped. He kept diving in his own two-seat submarine, the Remora 2000, rated to 610 meters, hunting shipwrecks off the Provençal coast from a support boat called the Minibex, and in his lifetime he made more than 1,000 submarine dives in 12 different submarines. He died in Marseille on February 14, 2012, at 82, in the company's 50th year. His family still runs Comex, now led by his granddaughter, Alexandra Oppenheim-Delauze. It builds and tests pressure chambers, runs hyperbaric and altitude experiments for the French navy and for space programs, and works on how to keep astronauts alive on the Moon and Mars. In 2018 the French health authorities accredited it as a biomedical research center.

## VIII. Paint

The market for these watches is unlike anything else. In Geneva a clean 5514 sold at Phillips for CHF 87,500\. Comex Sea-Dwellers in reference 1665 now trade at somewhere between $150,000 and $200,000\. The 793 made €318,500 at Artcurial, about four times its high estimate, because it came straight out of its original owner's drawer with his logbooks, his training certificate and a bezel the Mediterranean had bleached to perfection. 

But that attention also spells trouble. The Comex dial is the single most faked detail in vintage Rolex. Genuine 16610s and 5513s, which are not rare, get reprinted dials and freshly engraved casebacks with plausible issue numbers, and some of them are good enough to get past people who should know better. Rolex's own service centers made things worse for years, swapping worn Comex dials for service dials that are worth noticeably less. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/comex-16.jpg)

The stories, when they are preserved, are something that cannot be forged. When Ralph Brauer died suddenly in the autumn of 2000 he had no family, and the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he had run the marine biomedical laboratory, inherited everything. Among his papers and his Japanese woodcuts the university found the Sea-Dweller Rolex had given him in Marseille in 1968, case number 1820177, with Gas Escape Valve punched into the back by hand. According to his assistant it had been under his mattress, with a stack of cash and a handgun. The university sold it. The watch passed from one collector to another through an old Rolex forum, and the buyer collected it in New York on the morning of September 11, 2001.

Comex never stopped working for Rolex, though almost nobody knows about it. When Rolex launched the Deepsea in 2008, rated to 3,900 meters, it needed a way to prove every single case before it left the factory, and the tank it uses was developed with engineers from Comex. When Rolex made the Deepsea Challenge, rated to 11,000 meters, Comex engineers built the machine that tests each titanium case to the pressure found at 13,750 meters. Somewhere in Geneva, in a white room with no windows, there is a steel vessel designed in Marseille. A watch goes in, the hatch is closed, the pressure rises, and nobody inside has to breathe. No drama.