COMEX & Rolex: The Partnership That Changed Dive Watches Forever

There’s a strange irony in the world of horology: some of the most legendary watches ever made didn’t come from a watchmaker’s boardroom but from the salty, pressurized depths of the ocean. The story of COMEX watches begins not in Switzerland, but in 1961 Marseille, France, where a young engineer named Henri Germain Delauze founded Compagnie Maritime d’Expertises—better known as COMEX. Delauze wasn’t chasing trends or prestige; he was chasing the ocean itself, determined to push humans deeper and longer beneath the waves than anyone thought possible. COMEX became the elite in commercial diving—specializing in saturation dives, undersea engineering, and missions so far beneath the surface that even steel bends under pressure.