Citizen

PROMASTER 1,000M DIVER

For your voyage to the bottom of the sea

“Since its founding in 1918, Citizen has held the belief of ‘Better Starts Now’ — that is, no matter who you are and what you do, it is always possible to make something better, and now is the time to start doing it.” So states Nobuyuki Tanaka, the company’s global manager of product marketing. It’s an ethos that Citizen has long lived and worked by. The firm, known as the Shokosha Watch Research Institute when it was set up in Tokyo nearly a century ago, is now a global company, and the world’s largest watchmaker.

Citizen is undoubtedly best known for its proprietary Eco-Drive movement, in which solar cells — elegantly concealed behind the dial — keep the watch constantly powered by any natural or artificial light source. It’s a movement found in around 80 per cent of the company’s watches, and one of the many pleasing features found on the sturdy, handsome Citizen Eco-Drive Professional Diver 1,000m. While the company has previously launched a mechanical 1,000m dive watch — the Promaster Mechanical Diver, released only in Japan in 2002 — the EcoDrive is the world’s first watch to combine light-powered technology with 1,000m saturation diving performance.

With its high-visibility luminous dial, and a bezel-locking mechanism replete with orange “warning” colour, the Promaster 1,000m Diver combines good looks with serious functionality — a necessity, when constructing a watch designed for the unforgiving pressures of the deep.

“Helium is the greatest obstacle when designing a light-powered watch for saturation diving environments,” says Tanaka. “The gas molecules are so small that they can easily penetrate the inside of a water-resistant watch. The helium then drives up the interior pressure of the case, risking damage to the glass and to the movement.”

To avoid this, the Promaster 1,000m Diver has been constructed using more of Citizen’s proprietary technologies — “Duratect” is a surface-hardening technology applied to the case to ensure it retains its lustre and finish, while the watch parts have been made from a proprietary substance known, pleasingly, as “Super Titanium”, which is five times harder and approximately 40 per cent lighter than stainless steel.

“By applying Duratect MRK to the case when parts like the crown tube and the escape valve tube were already in place, we bonded the individual components to the case at the atomic level to achieve a higher level of adhesion,” Tanaka explains. “The technical name for the process is ‘solid phase diffusion bonding’. The result — not just a tougher case surface, but durability capable of withstanding 1,000m of water pressure.”

This painstaking attention to precision engineering has ensured the Promaster 1,000m Diver could pass the rigorous tests it underwent in cooperation with Jamstec (the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology) — which ensures that the watch can remain functional for 15 days in a pressurised chamber filled with helium and oxygen, decompressed at high-speed, then reverted back to atmospheric pressure within three minutes.

Citizen has applied its famed EcoDrive technology to a robust and beautiful diving watch, and done so to an impossibly high-standard. “People love a well-made diving watch; just look at the popularity of the Rolex Submariner,” says Mark Toulson, head of watch buying at luxury retailer Aurum Holdings. “But there can’t be that many divers in the world, and I’m sure a lot of people won’t do anything more daring than wash their hands wearing it. But the Promaster is hugely popular, and rightly so — people like that it’s a big, imposing watch, and the fact that it’s truly an incredible piece of kit. It’s not for show, it’s a real functional thing.”

Simply ensure you change the rubber ring of the watch gasket exchange every two to three years (they form a watertight seal, and the water eventually degrades the rubber), come up for some sunlight every one-and-a-half years, and you’ll have a fine watch that will last you a very long time. As Toulson says, “The Promaster 1,000m is pretty damn special.”

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