1000 — the end of the hand-wound Oyster line

In brief

You wind this one yourself. While the rest of the Oyster range shifted across to Rolex's own centre-rotor automatics, the 1000 stayed on the price list: a plain hand-wound movement, 17 jewels, nothing more.

Short history

Rolex built its reputation through the 1930s and 1940s on hand-wound watches in a sealed Oyster case. By the end of the 1950s, with the 1030 and then the 15xx family, most of the catalogue was moving over to automatics made entirely in-house. The 1000 belongs to that last stretch of manual calibres, which ran alongside the new generation for a time before it took over completely.

Watches that used it

• Rolex Oyster Perpetual (hand-wound references of the late 1950s)
• Rolex Precision