The year was 1976. NASA successfully landed a robotic probe on Mars known as the Viking 1 which, for the first time, offered mankind a glimpse of what lies beneath the pink Martian sky. The Concorde, the world’s fastest commercial plane, took its maiden flight while Steve Jobs founded a company called Apple. In the watch world, quartz ruled the roost. Swimming against the tide was the great English watchmaker George Daniels who unveiled the co-axial escapement, acclaimed as nothing short of a technical revolution. But a conceptual revolution was underway that would change the face of the luxury watch industry forever, and that was the birth of the Patek Philippe Nautilus.
The Audemars Piguet Royal Oak, launched four years prior, might have remained just that — an experimental niche on a side road leading nowhere — were it not for the arrival of another luxury watch, brazenly made out of stainless steel but commanding the price of a gold watch. With the epiphany of quartz technology, the meaning of a mechanical watch as a tool almost vanished. The market was in need of a design intervention that would tilt the scales and offer a fresh perspective on the concept of a luxury watch. Together, they subverted the prevalent school of thought that luxury watches were made of precious metal and could easily slide under a cuff with their conservative forms and discreet dimensions.
Unbending and unapologetically industrial, the Nautilus committed so thoroughly to the new vision of modern luxury in its size, shape, material, robustness and most of all, price tag, that it worked. In fact, Patek Philippe advertisements of the era boasted that one of the most expensive watches in the world was made of steel. By its 40th birthday in 2016, demand for the Nautilus had already grown strong. From there, temperatures rose steadily, inspiring innumerable derivatives and pastiches in the market while waitlist stretched to nearly a decade. Finally, the brand announced the retirement of the steel Ref. 5711 last year, which sent prices spiralling into the stratosphere on the secondary market.
With the introduction of the new 5711G, we examine the full history of what has become the most coveted watch on the planet.
THE FIRST OF ITS KIND: REF. 3700 “JUMBO” (1976-1990)
The Nautilus of 1976 was the ref. 3700/1A with hours, minutes and a date at three o’clock, fondly known as the “Jumbo” due to its generous case diameter of 40mm (42mm ear to ear). Its inspired design, as with the Royal Oak, was the brainchild of the late Gérald Genta, who famously sketched its blueprint in five minutes while dining meters away from a table of Patek Philippe executives. Whereas the eight-sided octagonal bezel of the Royal Oak was modeled after deep-sea dive helmets, the rounded octagonal shape of the Nautilus drew inspiration from the hermetically sealed portholes on transatlantic ocean liners.
Beyond their steel cases, both watches went against the grain of how luxury watches
