We have a lot of affection for the horological "little guys" here at Analog/Shift. Even when those "little guys" are downright monstrous lumps of steel.
This Aquastar Benthos 500 is just such a monster. Built from the ground up as a no-holds-barred, extreme diver, it can't be considered a pretty watch by any means. But if you're being serious about your tool watch design, aesthetics are very much a secondary thought. (Consider the Omega PloProf 600, for example). Unlike so many of the modern boutique brands that are building chunky steel divers with excessive specifications for contemporary desk divers, the story of the Aquastar goes back to 1962, the very beginnings of SCUBA diving as a sport, and the dawn of the golden age of diver's watches.
The Benthos 500 was the world's first diving watch to be rated water resistant to 500m, a tremendous accomplishment for a small manufacture in the 1960s. Utilizing a monopusher design, it has a 60-minute timing totalizer with flyback function built into the movement, along with a traditional unidirectional rotating diver's bezel. This means that a SCUBA diver can easily and legibly track elapsed minutes under water using the central minutes hand, while the bezel can be used as a secondary timer. (One might track total dive time, while the other tracks a decompression stop, for example.)
This particular Benthos 500 from circa the 1960s is an example of the first generation of the model. Housed in a 43mm stainless steel case with a mineral crystal, a screw-down crown at the 2:00 position, a minute-reset pusher at 4:00, and crisp dive timing bezel, it features a matte black Tritium dial with a matching handset, and the party-piece orange ‘creeping-minute' hand.
Powered by the unique A. Schild automatic movement with central chronograph minutes, this is one of the downright coolest, purpose-built dive watches we’ve ever laid our hands on.
Watches such as this one are fun and wonderful timepieces, and there's no telling if and when one of these in any condition will surface again, so don't wait!
