Jacques-Yves Cousteau wears a Rolex Submariner

World Without Sun (1964) documents Conshelf Two, the experiment in which a half-dozen of Jacques-Yves Cousteau's oceanauts lived for thirty days in a starfish-shaped house ten meters down in the Red Sea off Sudan, while two of them spent a further week in a smaller deep cabin at thirty meters. Cousteau directed and appears throughout, and the film took Best Documentary at the 37th Academy Awards.

For watch spotters the film is a crowded aquarium. Omega built experimental Seamaster 300 prototypes for the Conshelf Two diver team, engraved CONSHELF II - RED SEA/63 on their casebacks, and they can be seen through the whole film on the divers testing them. Albert Falco wears a Blancpain Fifty Fathoms, Raymond Coll and Philippe Cousteau wear Aquastar Deepstars, and Bernard Delmotte wears a Nivada Grenchen Depthomatic. The captain himself is the quietest entry on the list: the one published reading of his wrist in this period puts Cousteau, alongside Andre Laban, in an early Rolex Submariner of the type without crown guards, and our frames from the habitat never bring his watch close enough to check. That single reading is the only evidence on his wrist, so the watch can be called a Submariner and nothing more precise.

Cousteau wore different dive watches across his career, Blancpain and Rolex and later Doxa among them, and his team's wrists were more varied still. The Conshelf prototypes belonged to the divers who lived in the house. What the boss wore while he filmed them was, on the available evidence, his own old Submariner.