Why Has Squale Only Made Dive Watches Since 1959?

Most watch brands eventually spread out.

A company known for dive watches adds a chronograph. Then perhaps a pilot’s watch, a dress collection or something deliberately more complicated. It makes commercial sense: more types of watches mean more reasons for different people to buy one.

Squale has largely resisted that temptation.

The company’s own description is direct: “Since 1959 Squale has been producing solely diving watches.”

This goes back to founder Charles von Büren, whose interest in diving and the underwater world shaped the type of watches he wanted to make from the beginning.  More than 65 years later, Squale still builds its catalogue around the same basic problem: making a watch that works underwater. 

 

Squale started at exactly the right time

The decision makes more sense when you look at when Squale emerged.

Charles and Helene von Büren were already producing watches in Neuchâtel before the Squale name existed, but their attention increasingly turned towards underwater watches at a time when recreational and professional diving were developing rapidly. In 1959, Von Büren registered the Squale trademark and secured the company’s first patent relating to dive-watch cases. Squale-branded watches followed in the early 1960s. 

Water-resistant wristwatches had existed for decades, but the emergence of scuba equipment, military diving and increasingly ambitious recreational diving created new demands. Watches were being asked to survive higher pressures while remaining legible, comfortable and dependable enough to be treated as equipment rather than simply jewellery.

Divers relied on a watch, depth gauge and decompression tables to keep track of how long they had been underwater and calculate their ascent. Squale’s own history of the Master describes a watch during this period as a crucial part of conducting a safe dive rather than an optional accessory.

Charles von Büren was not simply choosing a fashionable style of watch. He was working on a category with genuine engineering problems still left to solve.

Squale became a case specialist before it became widely known for its own watches

One of the more unusual parts of the Squale story is that some of its influence can be found on watches that do not say Squale prominently on the dial.

By the 1960s, Von Büren’s company was producing pressure-resistant dive-watch cases for other manufacturers. Squale says these watches could be identified by the small shark emblem placed at six o’clock or on the caseback. 

Watchmaking was, and remains, an industry built heavily around specialist suppliers. A company did not necessarily have to manufacture every component itself to produce a serious watch. If you needed a case capable of surviving substantial underwater pressure, it made sense to buy one from a company that had concentrated on solving exactly that problem.

Squale was one of the important specialist case makers of the period, documenting its cases being used by brands including Blancpain, Doxa and Heuer. This helps explain why Squale’s specialisation became so deeply embedded. Dive watches were not simply one collection within the company. Underwater cases were the company’s expertise.

A dive watch was still something to experiment with

That focus also meant Squale could keep changing the answer.

The Squale Master was conceived as the more technically ambitious branch of the range. Squale says its early objective was pressure resistance of up to 100 atmospheres, an unusually serious figure for a watch developed during the 1960s. Screw-down crowns and casebacks were central to the construction, while the company experimented with case thickness and crystal design to achieve the required pressure resistance without producing something unnecessarily cumbersome.

Then came the 2002, launched in 1968 and capable of reaching 1,000 metres. Its cushion-shaped case and four-o’clock crown were not simply styling exercises; they represented another approach to building a highly water-resistant professional watch. Squale’s current 2002 remains a 1,000-metre diver, preserving much of that original identity.

By the 1970s, Squale developed what would become the 1521. Instead of chasing another record depth, Von Büren worked in the other direction: making the watch thinner and easier to wear while still maintaining 50 ATM of pressure resistance. 

Why the 1521 still looks the way it does

The 1521 is probably the easiest modern example of what happens when a design evolves around a particular job.

Its crown sits at four o’clock, tucked into the asymmetric case rather than protruding conventionally at three. Squale says the position was chosen to reduce the chance of the crown receiving an accidental knock underwater and potentially becoming unscrewed.

The case is similarly distinctive because much of its shape has a functional origin. It was developed from the larger Master concept but reduced to around 12mm thick, with a flat crystal helping achieve the slimmer construction while retaining its 500-metre rating. The bezel used a 60-click unidirectional system to allow elapsed dive time to be tracked.

Those decisions eventually became Squale design signatures.

That is often how good tool-watch design works. Something begins as a functional answer, then survives long enough to become part of the way a brand looks. The four-o’clock crown now immediately reads as Squale.

Squale watches are used for what they were built for

Squale’s history is particularly useful here because there is evidence of the watches being used in serious diving rather than simply being marketed around it.

Squale’s history is particularly useful here because there is evidence of the watches being used in serious diving rather than simply being marketed around it.

Freediving legend Jacques Mayol provides one of the clearest examples. In 1970, he reached 76 metres in Japan wearing a Squale 2002. Six years later, Mayol became the first freediver to pass the 100-metre barrier, eventually reaching 105 metres at the age of 56.

His significance went beyond depth records. Mayol helped bring freediving into the mainstream, approaching it through relaxation, yoga breathing and a fascination with the body’s mammalian diving reflex.

Squale also developed relationships with military and professional diving organisations. In the 1970s and 1980s, the 1521 became associated with the Italian Navy, and the company later produced watches for organisations including the Italian State Police Divers Unit. Its modern Marina Militare projects continue a relationship that Squale dates back roughly four decades. 

So why not make something else?

There is no technical reason Squale could not make a dress watch.

It could put a slim automatic movement into a polished 36mm case, remove the bezel and write an entirely plausible paragraph about Swiss elegance.

But what would make it particularly Squale? That seems to be the more useful question.

Specialising in diving has given the company a clear set of things to think about: water resistance, legibility, elapsed-time measurement, crown protection, case construction, corrosion resistance and wearability around water. Those priorities can then be interpreted differently from one collection to another without requiring the brand to abandon the field it knows.

The original Super-Squale, for example, was conceived as a lighter skin diver with a 38mm case and 200 metres of water resistance. The modern version keeps that compact character but replaces the old plexiglass construction with double-domed sapphire.

At the opposite end, the current Master Titanium is made from grade 5 titanium, uses a 4mm-thick crystal and helium escape valve, and is rated to 120 ATM — 1,200 metres.

They are both dive watches.

They are not remotely the same watch.

Does anyone still need a mechanical dive watch?

Not in the way they did when Charles von Büren started working on them.

A modern professional diver has equipment capable of calculating and displaying far more information than a rotating bezel and mechanical movement ever could. A watch is no longer responsible for being the primary instrument that determines whether someone begins an ascent at the correct moment.

Modern dive watches retain a very clear functional design language because that design works well outside the water too. High contrast makes a watch easy to read. A screw-down crown and strong case construction provide useful resilience. A timing bezel can measure considerably more mundane things than a dive. Serious water resistance means the owner does not need to worry every time the watch gets wet.

And perhaps more importantly, the design has a reason behind it.

The crown is where it is because somebody once worried about hitting it underwater. The bezel turns because elapsed time mattered. The luminous markers are large because darkness arrives quickly at depth. Those details are now part of watch design, but they began as answers to practical questions.