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The “Weirdest” Rolex Ever Made? Let’s Talk Explorer 16570
Welcome to my Rolex Explorer 16570 review. Some people say it’s the weirdest Rolex that Rolex ever made. I wholeheartedly disagree. I think it is the Sky-Dweller or the Yacht-Master 2. Either way, this watch was designed for spelunkers, speleologists, cave dwellers, Arctic explorers, and the like. The question is why and how? Also, hello!
Rolex’s Absolute Market Domination
In order to understand this, today we’ll be dissecting why Rolex just flat-out dominates absolutely everybody. In 2023, their watch sales surpassed their top five competitors combined, and Morgan Stanley has called this unprecedented dominance. Michael says, “That’s crazy, you guys must be so rich!”
The founder of Rolex, Hans Wilsdorf, said he came up with the name Rolex when a genie whispered it into his ear while he was on a horse-drawn bus in London. Funny enough, that’s exactly how I came up with the name “The Iron Snail.”
If your job makes it very hard for you to discern whether it is nighttime or daytime, and that is very dangerous, this is the Rolex for you. This is the one you want.
My 12 Years in the Watch World (For Those Who Don’t Know Me)
Also, this article may seem totally out of left field if you haven’t been following every move of my career. I’ve actually worked in the wristwatch world for 12 years before The Iron Snail. I photographed watches for a guy on Reddit.
Then I sold watches myself on Reddit. I edited for a YouTube channel called Theo and Harris for quite a few years, and then I ended up working for Theo and Harris. Then Christian and I started to make films for watch brands and met a bunch of watch brands, and I’ve been in the sticks for a while.
The Real Secret to Rolex’s Success: Marketing Genius
This wouldn’t be a complete Rolex Explorer 16570 review without talking about marketing. The most important thing that we need to understand is that Rolex is a marketing madman, a marketing machine, and they have been since their inception.
Marketing is their biggest thing. Wristwatches were getting into fashion—before that, obviously, it was pocket watches—but around World War I, when soldiers were taking their pocket watches and strapping them on their wrists so they could see better as they were shooting people in trenches, Rolex did not make the first wristwatch.
But Hans Wilsdorf was like, “I want to make the first durable and accurate wristwatch.” And a lot of other brands thought that too, of course, but he really hit the nail on the head with marketing immediately.
The first thing that Rolex did was get their watches to be chronometer-certified in 1910. What does it mean? Basically, they were certified to be accurate by an independent company that wasn’t Rolex.
They were certified to be accurate in a bunch of different positions, all within -4 to plus 6 seconds a day variance of your watch.
So they made sure that your watch was accurate, and then shortly after the chronometer certification, Rolex went full hog on making their watches waterproof.
The Mercedes Gleitze Story: Marketing Gold in the 1920s
This is where the marketing comes in really effective and really one of the coolest stories for Rolex, but they were not the first ever brand to make a wristwatch that is waterproof—they say waterproof at the time- but water-resistant.
There were technologies out there, but Rolex was the big king in mass-producing it and popularizing it. And instead of just dropping their watch in a cup or something and being like, “Look, it’s really water resistant,” this is really just where Rolex started to dominate marketing.
One of their most famous marketing stories of all time involves a swimmer named Mercedes Gleitze and the Vindication swim. Mercedes Gleitze was the first ever British woman to swim across the English Channel, and she was also a typist.
It was the 1920s, so I’m assuming she just finished typing and was like, “I’m going to try and do that today,” and then she did. But there was some controversy around her doing it. This is the funniest 1920s story that I’ve ever heard.
The main reason people didn’t believe Mercedes Gleitze about her incredible accomplishment was because a woman named Mona McLennan came out of nowhere and was like, “Uh, I actually did that. I swam the English Channel too, way faster than Mercedes.”
And the press was like, “What? Are you kidding me? Do you have any proof?” And she was like, “Nope, I have no proof, no one was there, I have no photos, no records, nothing. I just did it faster.” And the media was like, “Mercedes, are you hearing that?” And she was like, “Yeah, that’s pretty airtight.”
Long story short, though, this swim, the Vindication swim, was a BFD. It was a big deal all of a sudden because this woman, Mercedes, was trying to prove that she, in fact, was the greatest swimmer and did that incredible feat, but the weather was way worse, and it was colder.
So she lubes herself up in lard and just dives back in the water, but before she does, Hans Wilsdorf runs over to her with a necklace and places a Rolex Oyster around her neck right before she swims.
Mercedes actually did not complete the swim—it was too cold, she was fading in and out of consciousness—but in the most 1920s fashion of all time, they were like, “Wow, that was so—you are so impressive that there’s no way Mona is telling the truth.”
Also, upon further thought, she really provided no evidence. And then Mercedes pops out, flexes her Rolex to the world, boom! Rolex is an icon.
Two Game-Changing Innovations (That Rolex Didn’t Actually Invent)
The way Rolex marketed their watch with Mercedes kind of became the new way of doing things for Rolex. They were trying to represent the pinnacle athlete, the pinnacle of human achievement, the most accurate wristwatches—they were ahead of everybody.
That was their thing. So the perfect storm kind of happened where people are thinking, “Okay, I’m going to get a wristwatch. I don’t want my pocket watch. I want something that’s accurate and durable.
I know that one brand that’s really easy to say had their watch certified to be accurate, and then I saw that thing with that woman who swam with it in the water, so it’s really durable. I’ll get that one.”
And that core, that first marketing push—basically Rolex just went off forever. They just had to keep up the achievements.
Forty-five years after all of that and 11 years after Hans Wilsdorf passed away, we have the introduction of the Rolex Explorer 16570. But in the meantime, two very important things happened in watch world history and also Rolex history.
The first thing is—this is a prime example of what I was saying—Rolex popularized something, they didn’t invent it.
Rolex actually got in trouble for kind of implying that they did invent this, and John Harwood actually invented it.
Rolex, in order to make a really truly water-resistant watch, has to reduce as much user error as possible.
The biggest area that a user can mess up in is when they have to unscrew the crown of their watch to wind it, they have to remember to screw it back in so that way it’s locked and water can’t come in, but obviously, people aren’t perfect, and they forget, so then the water goes in their watch and breaks it.
The solution to this is a watch that is powered by the movement of your wrist. So when I move my wrist, a weight spins around inside the watch, tightening the spring and keeping the watch ticking.
The original version of this was called a bumper movement, so the weight inside didn’t spin all the way 360° around—it bumped on two springs back and forth.
The Rolie Polie Olie brand said, “Hey, what if we fix that? What if it didn’t bump and it was smooth, and we called our watches Rolex Oyster Perpetuals?” Another great name got to give it to them for that.
So it took off and people loved it, and Rolex was like, “We invented that!” And John Harwood was like, “What the heck is going on here?”
The other thing Rolex did during that time that was very nice was that they had the first automatic changing date. So it used to either—there was a bezel on the outside, or you had to put a pin on the side of the watch to click the date forward, or you had to move the crown.
Now, with the automatic movement and the power from it and everything like that, click—this would just click at midnight very satisfyingly.
Essentially, Rolex was doing every single possible thing that they could do to remain at the tippy top. And they have, by market share, remained at the top forever. And they did that by constantly trying to keep their watches as the number one—what can we innovate and what can we change?
And at the same time, who can we partner with that’s doing something great? How can we get to the pinnacle of achievements? How can we get a watch on people’s wrists that are doing that?
And honestly, every great human achievement since Rolex came out—they’ve been there. Except for the moon. Didn’t get to the moon, did you, Rolex? That goes to Omega. The Rolex CEO sits down at another board meeting and it’s like, “Full moon today, guess Omega stock is going up.”
The Real Problem: Telling Time When There’s No Sun
The biggest problem that Rolex had to address was that if you’re in a cave or if you’re in the Arctic or somewhere where the sun doesn’t set, it’s hard to know if it is daytime or nighttime just by looking at your watch, and you can forget, and that’s dangerous.
As you know, the clock’s minute hand goes fast, the hour hand goes slow, but it goes around twice.
Rolex added a red 24-hour hand, and of course, the bezel is a 24-hour dial.
Then Rolex updated their movements so the 24-hour hand and the 12-hour hand weren’t linked together, so you could change the time independently, meaning one minute if I’m traveling, for example, and I’m going from California to the East Coast, I can click the hour hand of my watch 3 hours forward and the 24-hour time doesn’t change.
That is, of course, very convenient if you are walking in a cave so big that you are crossing time zones and you’re like, “This California better change my watch”.
How the Explorer 2 Evolved: From Orange Hands to Polar Dials
While we make our way back, though, I would love to go over the changes that were made from the original 1655 to models after that. The first thing is we don’t have the big fat orange hand anymore.
I’ve read a bunch of reasons why this change happened. Some of the changes were because it fit in with the rest of Rolex’s line a little bit better—they wanted to differentiate the movement and the big changes that came with the watch.
I think it’s just a style update, and it makes the watch a little bit more easily digestible for the mass market, so they don’t have this big fat orange hand.
The other thing they did was cover their dial in lacquer so it’s very shiny and not matte anymore. This was done for a few reasons, one of them just being it does make the watch look better and fancier and cooler and all that stuff.
But the other is this lacquer coating is supposed to make the dial more durable, look more brilliant over time, and be more resistant to sun damage.
And the other thing and the last thing and the most important thing is they introduced the polar dial, which is why this watch is exploding in value, or was exploding in value. Rolex doesn’t typically do white dials, very, very rarely.
Again, the reason that they did this is to get even more visibility so you can see the time if it’s getting really dark if you’re in the Arctic and the sun isn’t up for a really long time if you’re in a cave—you want as much light to bounce off your dial as possible so you can see what time it is but either way, that is how we got here to the design.
The Birth of Modern Cave Exploration (And Why Rolex Wanted In)
The question is, why? The original Rolex Explorer 16570 came out in 1971, and as we know, many, many things in the outdoor world came out in the 1970s and 1960s because nylon was exploding in popularity.
We were getting a bunch of crazy technologies like Gore-Tex, but check this out: “In 1968, Bruno Dressler asked Ferdinand Petzl to build a rope ascending tool, today known as the Petzl Croll.
Pursuing these developments, Petzl started in the 1970s as a caving equipment manufacturer called Petzl. The development and evolution of mechanical ascension systems extended the practice and safety of vertical exploration to a wider range of cavers.”
Caving lights are getting better, and caving safety equipment, the ropes, the tools, the ascension systems—all of that is coming together. Rolex, obviously—the Explorer One existed, but they’re like, “This is a totally new generation of explorers. This is like the second generation from the mountains now to the caves.”
Someone can find something crazy, and if they do and they walk out of a cave holding something like Poseidon’s trident, and they turn to the press and they’re like, “Yeah, this is Poseidon’s trident,” boom!
Look what is front and center in human achievement—a watch specifically designed for that exact purpose.
Watch This Review
The Real Genius: A Watch for Every Human Achievement
They essentially have a model for every dream, every human accomplishment that you could possibly have, and their whole goal is to make a watch that’s fit for that scenario and get it on the winner—it has to be on the winner.
And when cave diving and cave exploring were starting to explode and get more and more popular, Rolex was like, “Okay, let’s make the watch, let’s find the winner.”
Okay, thank you very much for reading my Rolex Explorer 16570 review. See you all next time!
This article was adapted from Michael Kristy’s video on The Iron Snail, with edits from FashionBeans, and was reviewed by Michael to ensure the integrity of his original content. Watch the full video here.
The Iron Snail is a men’s fashion vlog (and now article series!) starring a young man named Michael and featuring a snail no bigger than a quarter. The two are set on taking over the world of fashion by creating a clothing line to end all clothing lines. Until then, we’re here to tell you EVERYTHING you need to know about the best clothing out there, from the highest quality raw denim jeans to the warmest jackets to the sturdiest boots…the Iron Snail has got you covered.