Tudor

Tudor traces its origins to 1926, when the name was registered in Switzerland on behalf of Hans Wilsdorf, the founder of Rolex; Montres Tudor SA followed in 1946. Wilsdorf's aim was a watch sold through Rolex dealers and positioned below Rolex, using Rolex cases and crowns around externally sourced movements. The Oyster Prince of 1952 brought self-winding, and the Submariner of 1954 was supplied from the 1960s to the French Marine Nationale and the US Navy, which is why early Tudor divers draw the attention of collectors of military watches.

Today Tudor is based in Geneva and, like Rolex, belongs to the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation. The current range was reshaped in 2012 around two lines: the Black Bay, which reinterprets the brand's own dive watches of the 1950s and 1960s, and the titanium Pelagos. Since 2015 the company has fitted manufacture calibres of the MT56 and MT54 families, several of them COSC-certified with silicon hairsprings, alongside the ETA-based movements it used for decades.