Rolex SA was founded in 1905 by the German Hans Wilsdorf and his brother-in-law, Alfred Davis. Contrary to popular belief, Hans Wilsdorf was neither Swiss, nor a watchmaker. 
Wilsdorf & Davis was the original name of what later became the Rolex Watch Company. They originally imported Hermann Aegler’s Swiss movements to England and placed them in quality cases made by Dennison and others. These early wristwatches were then sold to jewelers, who then put their own names on the dial. The earliest watches from the firm of Wilsdorf and Davis are usually marked “W&D” – inside the caseback only.
Hans Wilsdorf registered the trademark name “Rolex” in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland in 1908. The origin of the name is obscure. One story, which was never confirmed by Wilsdorf, is that the word “Rolex” came from the French phrase horlogerie exquise, meaning exquisite watch industry. Another is that the name was chosen to indicate movement when spoken in English.
Another little known fact is that Rolex participated in the development of the original quartz watch movements. Although Rolex has made very few quartz models for its Oyster line, the company’s engineers were instrumental in design and implementation of the technology during the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1968, Rolex collaborated with a consortium of 16 Swiss watch manufacturers to develop the Beta 21 quartz movement used in their Rolex Quartz Date 5100. Consequently, after five years of research, design, and development,
Rolex engineering efforts finally culminated in the “clean-slate” 5035/5055 movement that would eventually power the Rolex Oysterquartz – arguably the finest quartz movement that has ever been made.
The first self-winding Rolex watch was offered to the public in 1931, preceded to the market by Harwood which patented the design in 1923 and produced the first self-winding watch in 1928, powered by an internal mechanism that used the movement of the wearer’s arm. This not only made watch-winding unnecessary, but eliminated the problem of over-winding a watch and harming its mechanism.
