How Borgel and Taubert revolutionised water resistance

Buffy Acacia

As with pretty much all human technology, watches developed slowly at first, and then seemingly all at once. Protecting a watch mechanism from both dust and moisture is really just common sense, otherwise nobody would have built cases for clocks. When it came to the mass popularisation of pocket watches in the 1800s, people didn’t immediately think that these amazing miniature clocks needed to go swimming with them. However, when we’re looking at the eventual development of purpose-built dive watches by the ‘50s and ‘60s, there are two older companies to whom we owe their possibility — Borgel and Taubert.

Imagine yourself in the late 1870s, with chronometers on ships being used in full force. HMS Challenger found the deepest point in the ocean just a couple of years ago, the phonograph has just been invented, and the Balkans have been thoroughly restructured after the Russo-Turkish War. Henry Morton Stanley completed his trans-African expedition in 1877, and Western Europe heavily romanticised the idea of traipsing through the jungle. Explorers who wanted to wear watches in those humid conditions could use pocket watches with canteen crowns, essentially threading a cover over the gap for the stem in the case and sealing it with a leather washer.

Explorer’s watches like these hit upon a fairly primitive form of water resistance, but they did do the groundwork for later developments. You wouldn’t want to submerge them, but they prevented a fair amount of moisture from entering the case and causing condensation or corrosion. The screw-down crown as we know it today was patented by Ezra Fitch in 1881, using the crown itself as a threaded cover instead of a separate one.

That was a huge improvement in convenience and aesthetics, however it didn’t necessarily help the watch to be any more water resistant. The same is true for modern watches, because screw-down crowns prevent you from accidentally opening the crown underwater, but it doesn’t actively prevent water ingress.

There were various small improvements to the screw-down crown over the next decade, but the next major leap happened in 1891 thanks to François Borgel. Borgel’s patent described a two-piece pocket watch case which instantly cut out half of a watch’s potential weak spots for water resistance. The movement was installed in a carrier ring that also had the dial and crystal fitted, and the whole thing then screwed into the front of the case. The threads were very fine, forming a tight seal against dust and moisture. As for the crown, it used a split stem so that it could be fed through both the case and the carrier ring. Rather than having a screw-down crown which accumulated dust and wore out surprisingly quickly in those days, the crown assembly had a spring which pulled the crown down and kept tension on it constantly.

You might wonder how a watch could reliably be water-resistant without any form of gasket, but the choices of gasket in the 1890s were either waxed cotton, string, or leather. None of those materials are particularly good at keeping water out to begin with, so metal-to-metal contact was actually all a case needed, as long as the manufacturing quality was high enough. There are even stories of Borgel cases accidentally ending up in washing machines and coming out fine. Of course, repeated swims weren’t the intention behind the old style of “waterproofing”, so tight tolerances were enough for most occasions. They weren’t necessarily considered exclusively sporty either, as some cases were produced in 18k gold.

By the time the First World War came around, Borgel had adapted his two-piece case design into a smaller wristwatch style. “Wristlets”, as they were known back then, were rare before the War, but not unheard of. The earliest-known Borgel wristwatch case was used in a one-off IWC watch from 1906. Once wristwatches were understood to be superior to pocket watches as instruments in the War, many more Borgel wristwatch cases were produced. Longines was a great customer of Borgel too, especially during WWI.

After the First World War, things weren’t looking great. François had passed away in 1912, and his daughter Louisa Borgel had to take the reigns during the War, but then sold the company to another Swiss family, the Tauberts. The newly formed Taubert & Fils company owned and succeeded Borgel in every sense, but it certainly went on to do justice to the original legacy. You can also tell that the new controlling family had the utmost respect for François Borgel, because they re-registered the FB trademark and key that is stamped on every Borgel case (except for the Mido Multifort watches), even up until the 1960s.

Within a few years, Taubert kept up momentum filing patents to do with water resistance, but there were two in particular worth noting. The first was granted in 1928, creating a new way of sealing a watch’s crown stem with natural cork. A specialty tool was designed to compress a piece of greased cork before slotting it inside the crown, where it would then expand to fill the gaps. It didn’t require a screw-down crown to keep water out, and although screw-down crowns were safer in theory, daily use from manually-winding the watches wore out the threads quickly, especially if it was a softer metal case. This system was most famously used by the Mido Multifort from 1934 onwards, then being named Aquadura in 1959 once the original patent had expired. Even after rubber gaskets were common, Mido only stopped using the Aquadura system in the last decade or two.

The second noteworthy Taubert patent was its decagonal case, using a 10-sided screw-in bezel and caseback. To say it was ahead of its time is a drastic understatement. The flat sides of the new pieces allowed them to be tightened down with tools rather than just fingers, and they were much nicer to look at than slots for screwdrivers. It was also around the time that stainless steel became much more common in watchmaking, which was cheaper but harder to machine with delicate textures like coin-edge bezels. The decagonal bezel didn’t last too long as a design element, so Taubert returned to a two-piece construction with the dial and movement loaded in from the back. The movement was held beneath the crystal with an inner cover, and the caseback screwed down to keep everything in place.

The decagonal case with its cork-sealed crown was Taubert’s biggest achievement by far, commonly being used by Mido, Movado, and even Holy Trinity members Vacheron Constantin and Patek Philippe. The lusted-after Patek Philippe reference 1463J in solid 18k gold even uses one in a chronograph format, and you can still find the Borgel “FB” stamp on their casebacks, along with plenty more Calatrava references up until 1965. It’s also funny to consider that Borgel’s decagonal bezel was scrapped in the 30s, when it preceded the popularity of the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak’s octagonal bezel by 40 years.

During the late ‘50s and ‘60s, the commercialisation of scuba diving reached unprecedented heights. The thought of a wristwatch for diving was now something that consumers wanted, rather than just specialty tools for various naval forces. Many of the earlier patents had expired by then, so “waterproof” technology became a bit of a free-for-all among hundreds of Swiss brands latching onto the skin diver trend. Of course Rolex had a huge part to play from the ’20s onwards with the Oyster case, but the Oyster’s story is well-known. As for Taubert, the company was liquidated in 1972, likely due to a mix of circumstances and the Quartz Crisis. Companies were capable of making 1,000-metre dive watches thanks to vulcanised rubber o-ring gaskets and piston-sealed crowns, so Taubert’s biggest product was no longer relevant. Still, that might not have happened had it not been for Borgel and Taubert’s ingenuity in those first few decades of wristwatches.