Who said diving watches can’t be lightweight and full of innovation? The Ressence Type 5 shows the way

Type 5 

There is something to be said for bringing fresh perspectives to existing challenges; it’s certainly an approach that has driven Ressence from its inception, as founder and designer Benoît Mintiens, who hails from Belgium, is not a watchmaker by trade. Instead, he’s an industrial designer, and had previously tackled a wide range of designs, from high-speed trains to hunting guns, with a stop in medical devices, aircraft cabins, and leather goods. You can therefore imagine that Ressence watches are anything but conventional.

At first glance, you will recognize some common elements, such as the round shape of the case, the hour and minute hands in individual subdials, and numerals on the dial, but you may perhaps not immediately recognize how to read the time, for while the hands rotate as you would expect, the subdials rotate themselves around the dial simultaneously.

It does take some getting used to, as does the setting of the time itself, as there is no longer a crown on his current collections; Ressence’s early watches did have a crown, but ever the industrial designer, Mintiens pushed the technical team to eliminate that protrusion entirely – instead, the time is set by rotating the back of the watch.

Another esthetic aspect that is immediately apparent on Ressence’s more recent Type 2 and Type 3 is that the hands and subdials look as if they are flush with the sapphire case, almost as if they were printed on the surface.

This effect is achieved because the time display mechanism, in effect the top part of the watch, is filled with oil, which eliminates the optical refraction due to air that is present on traditional watches. You therefore have no impact on visibility brought on by the watch being seen at an angle. The movement itself is not immersed in oil, so the challenge was the make the time display and the time keeping mechanisms interact reliably, which is done through magnets.
This optical refraction is most apparent when a watch is placed under water, which is perhaps what planted the seed for Ressence’s newest timepiece, the Type 5. It bears the now familiar esthetic of a Ressence watch, with the rotating subdials and refraction-free display, with a structure that ascribes to the ISO 6425 standards for a diver’s watch.

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The oil-filled display actually goes a long way to keeping the watch to a slimmer profile than most diver’s watches, for the oil is itself incompressible, and therefore compensates for the added surface pressure when the watch is used for diving. The display will be a revelation for any diver, for it remains completely legible at any angle underwater, and is, as dictated by ISO 6425, luminous to boot.

With pure esthetics and simple operation, the Type 5 also features the crownless design, with the time once again set by rotating the case back, which now features a locking system for the compression of the watch’s water resistant gaskets – do require a high level of technical complexity; although the watch displays the time, a running indicator (another requirement of  ISO 6425, but it’s not a seconds counter as the hand makes one revolution in 90 seconds), and a temperature gauge, linked to the bellows system which compensates for temperature fluctuations, it requires some 324 components.

The Ressence Type 5 remains relatively compact though, with a substantial titanium case at 46mm, but with a thickness of 15.5mm only, and is a lightweight at 87g. It’s this outside-the-box thinking that has brought Ressence to the fore, and has enabled them to craft such a different diving watch, showing that there is undoubtedly a high degree of innovation to be achieved in mechanical watchmaking.

This article was originally published in Revolution Issue 37.