When Jaeger-LeCoultre launched what would become one of its most enduring watches in 1965, it was known merely by the uninspiring code E859, after the brand’s then habit of naming its models based on the three digits of its calibre number. Arguably that conveyed little to potential customers – which is why a US sales agent for the brand took it upon himself to give the alarm diving watch a proper name.
What, he must have wondered, would sound potent and powerful? How about taking inspiration from the nuclear-armed, submarine-launched ballistic missile that had been introduced earlier that decade, and which would come to be totemic of the Cold War? Today, of course, we know this model as the Polaris.
Watch history is replete with watches given evocative and often fantastic names, among the many no longer extant brands of the 1960s. There was the likes of Favre’s Moon Raider, for example, or Wittnauer’s Futurama. They normalised a trend to use names as a means of imbuing a watch with a certain character: adventurousness perhaps, exoticism, masculinity or, in these instances, a taste of tomorrow’s world. In some cases, the watch name has come to supersede the brand itself.
