Titanic remnants find new home in luxury watches

LONDON: Luxury watches made from what must be one of the rarest materials on Earth -- metal from the hull of the Titanic -- are going on sale in the United Kingdom
for up to 75,000 pounds, a daily reported here on Sunday.
 
"We wanted to make a watch that had history and this is the rarest, most historical metal we could get hold of... This watch will give people the chance to carry a piece of
history on their wrist," the 'Daily Mail' quoted Yvan Arpa, the Chief Executive of Geneva-based Romain Jerome which is making the watches.
 
Salvaged by divers from the wreck of the ocean liner which still lies 12,500 ft under the North Atlantic where it sank after hitting an iceberg in 1912 on its first voyage from
Britain to New York, the metal has been blended with modern ship-building steel to make the casing of the timepieces.
 
Coal which was to have been burnt in the Titanic's furnaces and which was also recovered from the seabed has been mixed with ceramics to create the black dials for the watches which will be marketed under the name Titanic-DNA in a limited run of 2,012 -- a reference to the 100th anniversary of the disaster in five years' time.
 
According to the daily, some of the models have been given a unique rusted appearance using oxidisation technique at a laboratory in Switzerland. The new steel and the old
tarnished metal have been blended at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, where the Titanic was built.
 
The watches, which have been criticised as being in bad taste by Titanic enthusiasts, feature hands inspired by the liner's anchor and the small seconds dial is designed to
look like the pressure gauges on the ship's boiler.
 
The watches range in price from 4,500 pounds to 75,000 pounds depending on the other main material used in their construction -- steel, silver or gold with diamonds.