No one can 100% prove anything, so it is all subjective.
I would agree that on the balance of probablities it was the Smiths but we cannot be sure.
It was interesting to see the references to watches being carried in the travellers' narratives during Peter Burt's recent presentation at the Royal Geographical Society. Those generally referred to pocket chronometers but indicate that it was common parlance for explorers referring to watches during Hillary's formative years.
Have you read all of this thread? Lots of people know lots of things from lots of sources. While it may be "impossible to conclusively prove or disprove anything" (when is it not?) there is a body of evidence leading to a balance of probability.
Good of you to declare your interest
Yes, you've already made that point and I have responded to it.
Oh I think you could. ;-)
Well that's been a genuinely fascinating and long read
I honestly do not give a damn. I knew about the Rolex / Smith squabble when I bought the Explorer and I just think of it as pointless waffle. Both watches made it to the top and who really gives a monkeys whether what watch was on a wrist or in a pocket.
The only proven conclusion is that it is all guesswork.
To be fair to QP, Rolex do like to give the impression that they were there that day. So people infer it.
Mind you they also claim to have invented the waterproof wristwatch, the automatic movement, the GMT hand etc
Thankfully someone has edited their Wikipedia page, correcting the claims to various “firsts”
Heck, for most of their existence (including in 1953) Rolex were really only retailers, buying in and badging up other makers’ movements and cases. At least Smiths was an in-house manufacture.
Just out of interest do you know which page of the current edition it's on? That will save me buying the whole issue! I'll just have a flick through at W H SMITHS (sic, ha ha)
Then I will email them with a scan of the The BHI Letters.
It need to be challenged and corrected. History is written by the winners.
Don't know if this has been posted here, two reels of downloadable movie about the 53 conquest with lots of wrist shots.
https://archive.org/details/theconqu...erestreel2.mov
This link has plenty of books about the expedition to borrow if you join for free.
https://archive.org/search.php?query...everest&page=3
I've read the entire thread. It took the best part of three hours, and I fell asleep twice.
Fascinating stuff, and I'm really grateful for the work done and the contributions made by the key players (you know who you are).
But I can't help but feel that your work is somewhat wasted in this format. Very few people will bother to read the entire thread. Lots of people will skim it, and thus potentially miss some of your very well researched arguments, and I think this is shown by some of the contributions of people who've arrived late to the party, and weighed in having clearly missed a trick or two.
Could you not get your heads together, and come up with something in a format which is more palatable and accessible than a repetitive adversarial forum thread, which would do a better job of getting your arguments "out there". Like a series of articles? Maybe even a book?
+1 to this. I've been subscribed to this thread for ages and keep meaning to slog through it all, but just don't have that much time. Especially with so much distracting chatter to filter out. Would be really good if someone could even highlight the key posts and link to them directly, as a kind of thread summary.
Thanks, that is Philippe Stahl's point: his website stand there, unchallenged and unchallengeable: seemingly authoritative and correct. He knows it's not but as you you can't post comments or questions it is -- or he has -- the last word.
I'd be up for a similar website, with the contributions and contributors here visible to all. Maybe Smiths could host it? They are still very much in business, just not making mechanical clocks or (any) wristwatches. (Mostly digital / electronic stuff in avionics iirc.)
Surely Eddie would be a logical choice as the current owner of the Smiths trademark for watches? Since Smiths are out of that business, I can't imagine they care much.
What about a blog entry on here to get things started, then see about getting the content mirrored somewhere more "official"? There certainly wouldn't be an issue with having no ability to comment if it references this thread. Comments don't necessarily need to appear on the page itself as long as they are not deliberately hidden away. In fact embedding them in the page gives an illusion of greater importance for the top handful of comments, while the rest are often buried.
Ultimately though what's needed is a single page that collates together all the evidence, established facts and opinions and clearly demonstrates what conclusions can and cannot be drawn. I would suggest wikipedia so anyone can edit, but they reject articles that contain original research or only reference primary sources. Another wiki site might be appropriate but without the strong moderation of a huge site like wikipedia, it would be very open to corporate tampering.
It seems that vBulletin has a wiki add-on, which Eddie could potentially get added here. That might make a nice extra feature to the forum that could have a lot of other uses beyond just this one case. I'm thinking about other reference information on obscure historical topics, technical watchmaking subjects, etc., that you wouldn't easily find anywhere else. If it required a TZUK login then that would stop the issue of anonymous edits & defacement.
I suspect however that any TZUK wiki would need a set or rules, like a minimum of 5 posts, 21 days membership and you must not have posted in the BP in the past 48 hours!
For what it's worth I rewrote my contribution here, with a fair bit more research to really tighten up just how clearly Rolex had been caught out, and reposted it here:
https://www.intlwatchleague.com/show...-Everest/page2
where it got collected up with some other 'Everest watch' stuff I'd written.
Last edited by M4tt; 17th November 2019 at 21:55.
It really is impressive how good a job Rolex's marketing has done of associating itself with the feat.
Even people who are aware of the Smiths connection seem to regard Rolex as the main player, and Smiths as a bit of an also ran.
I'll admit, before I read this thread, that was probably my assumption too.
Having read it, it's really hard to reach any conclusion other than that there is an awful lot of evidence to indicate a Smiths made it to the top, and nothing credible at all to indicate a Rolex did (and potentially quite a lot to indicate it didnt).
I don't think that really tells us much by the way. It certainly isn't to suggest that Rolex don't make absolutely excellent watches, which were more than capable at the time. It's just that's not how it played out.
I'm always astonished at how much influence threads like this can actually have in changing what is 'common knowledge' (or the price of a class of watch on ebay!) and I reckon, having been banging away on this door for a decade or more on various forums, that this is getting pretty close to tipping point. If it does tip, then I think Broussard is the man to credit with digging up the smoking gun that proves that, as I concluded, by way of a TL-DR, elsewhere:
Therefore, it is clear that neither Tenzing, nor Hillary nor Rolex believed there ever was a Rolex on the summit of Everest in 1953. No one is better placed to be sure about that.
In the Sotadic Zone, apparently.
I know, the problem is that I tend to write then proofread, as I already had a thread in the library, it was booted across before I'd made corrections and it wasn't worth bothering a mod about. There's a couple of other minor typos too.
Mind you, when you explain my TZ error, I bet you get it wrong too!
Last edited by M4tt; 18th November 2019 at 20:14.
There you go. Have fun.
I'll say it again, I think Mallory made it in '24 and my research for that is a damned sight more detailed.
Last edited by M4tt; 18th November 2019 at 22:35.