One of the most interesting watches in the Rolex line is the Milgauss. We'll
talk about all the different variations and what to look for here at SwissWatchExpo.
Fresh from the showcase here at SwissWatchexpo. We are talking about the Rolex Milgauss. This is
one of the most interesting watches in their line. And if you haven't seen it before,
you might have seen it and not realize what you were looking at. It might be a little bit under
the radar because it's not as pronounced as an striking watch maybe as some of the professional
series or certainly watches that have diamonds. I mean, this is a watch that you could wear.
And if you didn't want somebody to realize that you were wearing an expensive watch, the Rolex
Milgauss can be the under the radar watch, it can be great for casual Friday in the office.
If you don't want your clients to realize that you're doing well,
maybe you wear your Rolex Milgauss instead of a vintage Submariner or something like
that. But what's great about this watch is that it has the Rolex durability Rolex
features just in spades. And you're going to love how this watch works on your wrist.
When you wear it, when you look down at it, you're going to see the distinctive design elements of
it that really set it apart from all the other Rolex line. You won't see any Datejust or Air King
or professional series watch that looks like the Milgauss. So it really is exciting. Shout out to
Will wearing his, the first person I ever saw wearing one. But this watch came out in 1956.
I've heard the legend that there were a lot of scientists and engineers, people who were
in the booming technology factories at the time research labs, and that if they even got
100 or 200 gauss of magnetic exposure, it would make their watches go haywire.
And they're either wearing a watch that doesn't work right. Or they're just not wearing a watch
at all. So Rolex decided to attack the problem. I hear that, but I also know that Rolex tends to
backdate a story sometimes. And so maybe they came out with a watch that was really
resistant to magnetic fields, and then figured out who they were going to aim it out. Because
at the time there weren't that many people working in those industries, even if they had sold every
Milgauss they made to those people maybe they still would have had lots of extra inventory
leftover. So I'm not a hundred percent sure I buy that, but you can look into it yourself.
The mille means a thousand in French. So mille gauss, it would stand up to
a thousand gauss, which really was a technological revolution at the time.
And they had it verified by the European nuclear scientists, CERN. They're the folks that still run
the Large Hadron Collider. So we'll talk about that in a minute, but the watch at that time,
it looked a lot like a Submariner. It just had the lightening bolt secondhand,
and it was noted Milgauss on the dial. And if you find one of those might be an interesting oddity
something that wasn't made in big numbers, but that watch was made until 1988.
And then it went out of the collection for about 20 years and in 2007 for the
celebration of the Large Hadron Collider. And you'll have to look that up. I'm a big fan of this
piece of equipment. And it's really interesting if you look into what it does and why they built it,
but to celebrate that the same people CERN run the large Hadron Collider and to celebrate that.
That's why they came out with the, the Milgauss again in 2007. So when they first launched it,
it handled a lot of interesting features. It was referenced 116400. That's what all of these are
the reference number doesn't change with the dial color, but
it had the blue pair of Chrome hairspring built into the caliber 3131. So this is a workhorse
movement, extremely dependable, the blue pair of Chrome hairspring. And it has a zirconium alloy
that is extremely resistant to magnetic fields and shocks and temperature changes.
And so it's a great feature to get inside your watch. It also features a sort of a
soft iron core or cage, sorry sort of a shielding capsule that the movement goes in
that keeps it shielded from the magnetic fields. So that's unique to the Milgauss from all the
other Rolex watches and they built into it, all the other things that you would expect from
a Rolex sporty dressy watch that it's water resistant to a hundred meters.
It has the Sapphire crystal, all that is just what you would expect. The Oyster bracelet that's
included. It's a sort of the dressier version of the Oyster bracelet, where the center links
are high-polished, the edges are brushed, the sides are high Polish. And then of course it has
the Oyster clasp that is locked. It can't be opened unless you open it from the end.
And then it features the easy link. So you can open and close it by five millimeters without
any tools. The great thing about that is your wrist changes with the temperature
and humidity and whatever you've eaten. So it's a really nice to be able to
tighten it down if it feels like it's a little loose probably in the winter and then be able to
open it back up probably in the summer, if you feel stuck to your watch, it's a rough feeling.
So it's great to be able to just open it back up. So other than that, the only differences
between these models really are the crystal and the dial, so we'll talk about that when
they first launched it in 2007, white was one of the colors you could get, but if you notice the
baton hour markers are orange. And then the second hand, this is one of the defining
aesthetics of the Milgauss as this lightning bolt design. I think it's pretty bold for Rolex. When
you look at how conservative so many of their other watches are to have this lightning bolt
second hand really makes this watch stand out, and it shows that you're wearing something special,
something different, something that not everybody else who has a Rolex has.
It also has the minute track around the edge in orange text as well. And then the word Milgauss,
right under Rolex Oyster perpetual is an orange also.
So this one is a really interesting design. It's a bright, clean white,
and yet with the orange, it's really different. So I would definitely recommend that one
also in 2007, the first ones that came out had a black dial. Oh, by the way, this white dial,
this one was only made until 2016 and then it was retired from the collection.
So it might be something that becomes something of a collector's item in the future, since it was
only made for a relatively short period, but back to the black, the black one here, you can see that
at the edges around the edge of the dial where the minute track is the text isn't orange, but
the markers are. And so that's really interesting with the black color. Again, you've got the orange
lightening bolt dial, a lightning bolt secondhand, and the word Milgauss on the dial in orange.
Also, this one has the clear Sapphire crystal. So that's a different version from
this one, which has the black dial with the green Sapphire crystal. So when you see the
reference number end in GV, that stands for green glass essentially, and Rolex has used,
they say such a complex procedure to make this Sapphire crystal slightly green tinted that they
didn't even bother to patent it. But I find that quite interesting. When you look at it,
it really reflects the Rolex signature green color. You see it more around the edge as you're
looking at it, but it's a really distinctive look. And definitely one of the top choices.
If you're going to get a Milgauss, you can really kind of amp up its uniqueness by choosing
the green crystal. When you look at this dial, you can see that it's quite different from the
black dial, with the clear crystal, because the markers at three, six and nine are also orange,
and there's a combination of loom where they use the chrome light in green and blue.
So when you see this thing at night, it's really interesting. Of course, the lightning bolt
secondhand the orange numbers at the edge of the dial and the word Milgauss in orange also.
And then here we have what for a lot of people is kind of the star of the show. This one's called
Z-blue is the name of the dial. The reason it's called Z-blue is because the dial itself
is zirconium coated, which is why it has this beautiful color of blue that's just
not on any other Rolex watch. You can't get the Z-blue dial on anything but a Milgauss.
And you can see this one when you combine the blue dial with the green crystal, such a unique look.
You're really setting yourself apart with this watch versus anything else in the Rolex catalog.
Again, we've got the white markers, but with the orange numbers at the edge and the
word Milgauss and orange. Tell us which one would be your pick.
You might want to go a little bit more conservative and get the regular white or black
without the green glass or the Z-blue might be more your flavor.
They've all done very well. Over the last few years, the prices have been rising steadily.
Some of them up as much as 30% over the last two years. So might want to go ahead and jump
on them while we've got them available. You can see we've got all four versions in stock
today here at SwissWatchexpo. Click on the bell, like subscribe and give us a call.
See which ones we've got and let us know in the comments, which one you liked the best.
I think that for me, if I'm going to pick one right now today, it would be hard to choose.