Original vintage 1980s Rolex advert for the company's Explorer watch, celebrating legendary American mammologist, biologist, conservationist and author George Schaller, "We have the chance to save one of the last unspoiled ecosystems on our planet."
George Schaller is known as one of the founding fathers of wildlife conservation. He is best known for his work saving gorillas, tigers, pandas, and snow leopards. His more than 50-year-long career has been dedicated to species conservation. Discover magazine praised Schaller as " the finest field biologist of our time and the most powerful voice for conservation in more than 100 years."
Dimensions: Approx. 6.50 inches wide by 10 inches high.
The Rolex Explorer Watch
With its three-hand simplicity and discreetly wearable size, the Rolex Explorer is, more than any of the Crown's sport watches, the one that skirts the line dividing the tool watch from the dress watch. And yet it's also a Rolex most plainly made for legibility in adverse conditions and exposure to the elements.
The Explorer has come to embody what many see as the ideal "one nice watch" to own. Its simplicity and classic design allow it to go anywhere, not only far-off mountaintops. And the reference 1016 in particular, which spanned an incredible 29 years of production, from 1960 to 1989, stands as a true vintage hall-of-famer. With its subtle 36mm size, no-date simplicity, and crisp black dial – whether gilt or matte – it's the sport Rolex that doesn't turn heads – the anti-hype Rolex, if you will. The "if you know, you know" Rolex.
The Oyster Perpetual Explorer and Oyster Perpetual Explorer II evolved from Rolex’s deep involvement with exploration. The Swiss brand tested its Explorers by equipping polar, mountaineering and caving expeditions over many years. Some of the world’s most intrepid explorers, mountaineers and scientists took these watches to places that tested their reliability in the toughest conditions.
Beginning in the 1930s, Rolex equipped numerous expeditions with its Oyster Perpetual watches. Rolex watches have taken part in some of humanity’s greatest adventures – to include the 1953 expedition to Everest, led by Sir John Hunt, on which Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay Sherpa become the first to summit the world’s highest mountain. Feedback was used to develop what became known as the Professional category – watches that serve as tools, namely, the Explorer and Explorer II.
Rolex launched its Explorer in 1953 with a simple design and highly legible black dial with characteristic 3, 6 and 9 numerals and large index hour markers. Nearly two decades subsequent, the company introduced the Explorer II in 1971 and, in the same spirit as the Explorer. With its 24-hour display comprising an additional, orange hour hand and an engraved bezel, the Explorer II allows the wearer to clearly distinguish daytime from night-time hours – a practical option in places where distinguishing day from night is difficult, such as at the poles at certain times of the year, and in caves – or to read the time in a second time zone.
Dr. George Schaller
Dr. Schaller has studied and helped protect species as diverse as mountain gorillas, lions, giant pandas, and Tibetan antelopes, as well as trained nationals in their own country to carry on the work. These studies have been the basis for his scientific and popular writings including 16 books, among them, "The Deer and the Tiger," "The Year of the Gorilla," "The Serengeti Lion," "The Last Panda," and "Tibet Wild."
In 1956, Dr. Schaller joined other conservationists on the Murie expedition to Northeastern Alaska, which resulted in the establishment of the world’s largest wildlife preserve, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
In 1959, when Schaller was only 26, he traveled to Central Africa to study and live with the mountain gorillas. Little was known about the life of gorillas in the wild until the publication of "The Mountain Gorilla: Ecology and Behavior" in 1963, which first conveyed to the general public just how profoundly intelligent and gentle gorillas are, contrary to then-common beliefs. Schaller recounted his epic two-year study in "The Year of the Gorilla," which also provides a broader historical perspective on the efforts to save one of humankind's nearest relatives from the brink of extinction.
The American zoologist Dian Fossey, with assistance from the National Geographic Society and Louis Leakey, followed Schaller's groundbreaking field research on mountain gorillas. Schaller and Fossey were instrumental in dispelling the public perception of gorillas as brutes, by demonstrably establishing the deep compassion and social intelligence evident among gorillas, and how very closely their behavior parallels that of humans.
Spending most of his time in the field in Asia, Africa, and South America, Schaller has led seminal studies on and helped protect, some of the planet’s most endangered and iconic animals ranging from the mountain gorilla in the present Democratic Republic of the Congo, snow leopards in Mongolia, jaguars in Brazil, giant pandas in China, tigers in India, lions in Tanzania, wild sheep and goats of the Himalaya.
He currently serves as Vice President of Panthera, a foundation dedicated to wild cat conservation. In addition to this position, which he assumed in 2008. Dr. Schaller continues to serve as a Senior Conservationist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, worked as a Research Associate for the American Museum of Natural History, and has taught as an Adjunct Associate Professor at Rockefeller University, Shanghai’s East China Normal University, and Beijing’s Peking University.
In collaboration with Chinese and Tibetan scientists, Dr. Schaller has worked for nearly two decades studying and developing conservation initiatives for the snow leopard, Tibetan antelope, and wild yak, among other species. His most recent conservation projects have been based in Laos, Myanmar, Mongolia, Iran, and Tajikistan.