This timepiece is in very good condition. The caseback is worn down, consistent with bronze use, and there is patina colouring throughout the watch case. It includes a box, additional items, and papers.

Breitling SuperOcean Automatic 44 Bronze — Brown Dial — Ref. N17376201Q1S1 — 44mm — Full Set — 2024

The Only Breitling That Keeps a Record of Its Owner

In 1957, Breitling launched two dive watches on the same day: the time-only reference 1004 and the reference 807, credited as the world's first dive chronograph. Neither was built for a navy. They were built for civilians who had decided the water was worth going into, at a moment when the ocean still counted as frontier.

The line's most inventive chapter came in the 1960s with the SuperOcean "Slow Motion." Breitling moved the timing duty to a central minutes hand that made one revolution per hour, and added a small activity indicator at six o'clock "the dot" so a diver could confirm at a glance that the chronograph was actually running. It was a design solved backward from the problem: at depth, in low light, through a mask, what can a person actually read?

This SuperOcean Automatic 44 is drawn from that watch. The squared-off hands, the chunky luminous indexes, the high-contrast dial ring, all of it traces back to the Slow Motion's legibility-first logic. Breitling has simply stopped asking you to dive to appreciate it.

Then there is the bronze. Breitling specifies a corrosion-resistant alloy that still develops a patina over time, meaning this case is the one part of the watch that will not stay the way it left the factory. Most watches are valued for looking untouched. This one is valued for the opposite. The case on this example has already begun that process: the tone has deepened, the surfaces have softened, and the result is a watch that reads as owned rather than stored. Against the brown gradient dial and brown rubber, it lands closer to warm patinated metal than to a steel sports watch.

Sixty-eight years after the first SuperOcean went into the water, this is what that lineage looks like on a wrist: a 300-meter dive watch with a real design argument behind it, in a material that keeps score. The patina it carries now is the patina a previous owner gave it. Everything after this is yours.