Reference:6240

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Daytona → 6240

The 6240 is the first Oyster-cased Daytona and the first Rolex chronograph with screw-down pushers. It ran from 1965 to 1969 as a transitional reference between the pump-pusher 6239 and the long-running 6263, and it carries the design decisions that defined every Daytona that followed: an acrylic black bezel insert, a 100m-rated case, and the word "Oyster" added to the dial because the chronograph could finally claim it.

Rolex Cosmograph Daytona Ref. 6240 — Neanderthal example

Core facts

Field Value
Reference 6240
Family Daytona (Cosmograph, manual-wind)
Production 1965 to 1969
Movement caliber 722-1 (Valjoux 72 base), 18,000 vph
Case 36mm, 19mm lug width, screw-down chronograph pushers
Crystal acrylic
Bezel acrylic insert with engraved tachymeter, black
Crown Twinlock screw-down
Water resistance 100m / 330ft (up from 50m on 6239)
Dial "Oyster Cosmograph" — Cosmograph + Paul Newman exotic; rare "Solo"
Bracelet 7205 rivet (early), 7835 folded (late), end-link 271
Successor 6263 (screw-down pushers, long run)
Sibling 6241 (acrylic bezel, pump pushers)

Where it sits in the line

The manual-wind Daytona references break cleanly into three groups by pusher type and bezel material. The 6239 (1963 to 1969) carries pump pushers and a metal bezel, the 6241 (1966 to 1969) carries pump pushers and an acrylic bezel, and the 6240 sits with the screw-down pushers that define the Oyster sub-family. The 6262 and 6264 (1970 to 1972) bridge into the higher-frequency 21,600 vph Valjoux 727 era, and the 6263 (1971 to 1988) carries the screw-down-pusher Oyster format for the long run.

Read across the four-year window, the 6240 is the proof of concept. Rolex had patented its screw-down chronograph pusher in 1964 (CH423638), and the 6240 was the first reference to put that patent into production. Only after the 6240 demonstrated that the construction worked did Rolex commit to it as the standard for the rest of the manual-wind era, first with the brief 6262 / 6264 detour back to pump pushers and the metal bezel, then permanently from the 6263 onward.

Production outline

Production ran from 1965 to 1969 across the 1.1-million to 2.0-million serial range, in parallel with the pump-pusher 6239 and (from 1966) the 6241. Total production is undocumented in any Rolex source. The most often-cited working figure sits around 2,000 examples, which puts the 6240 at roughly one-tenth the volume of the 6239 across the same window. The Vintage Rolex Field Manual and Pucci Papaleo's Ultimate Rolex Daytona are the two book-length references most likely to carry tighter figures; the 2,000-piece estimate should be read as a working number, not a settled one.

The reference covers two broad production phases. The earliest examples in the 1.1M to 1.3M serial band carry the Mk0 "Millerighe" pushers: vertically grooved, finer in surface texture than the cleaner cylindrical pushers Rolex moved to almost immediately after launch. The Italian term millerighe translates as "thousand lines" and refers to the very fine knurling on the pusher tube. These pushers appear only in the earliest 6240 batch and are the single clearest production marker for a first-batch watch. From 1966 through 1969, the standard cylindrical screw-down pusher takes over and runs to the end of the reference.

Paul Newman exotic dials begin appearing on Daytona production around the 1.5-million serial range, fitted across the 6239, 6240, and 6241 cases at roughly one in twenty examples per period sources. The Neanderthal lot at the 2018 Phillips Daytona Ultimatum sale (case 1439122) sits in this band and forms the basis of the attribution dispute treated in Special branches below.

Movement notes

The 6240 runs on caliber 722-1 throughout, the second Rolex-stamped derivative of the Valjoux 72 ebauche, with column-wheel chronograph control, lateral clutch, tri-compax sub-dial layout, and a 17-jewel 18,000 vph beat rate. The architecture is the same Valjoux 72 base used across the entire manual-wind Daytona run; the 722-1 designation marks Rolex's intermediate finishing and bridge revisions before the 727 brought the frequency jump to 21,600 vph at the start of the 6262 / 6264 run in 1970.

The 18,000 vph rate is what every 6240 carries. There is no late-run frequency progression on this reference; the faster movement waited for the 6262 generation. US-bound 722-1 examples carry an engraved "ROW" import code on the balance bridge, the same import marking documented on the 6241 and 6239 of the period.

Dial map

The 6240 carries a small but important dial group. Most production wore the standard "Oyster Cosmograph" three-line dial, either black with white sub-dials (panda) or white with black sub-dials (reverse panda), with the "Oyster" line above "Cosmograph" giving the reference its name. A smaller share carried Paul Newman exotic dials with art-deco sub-dial numerals, square-tipped chronograph hashes, and a contrasting outer minute track painted in the colour of the sub-dials. The Solo dial, a Rolex-only configuration with no "Cosmograph" line and no other text, exists in very small numbers and is documented mostly through Italian collector channels.

Variant Distinguishing features Notes
Standard panda Cosmograph Black dial, white sub-dials, "Rolex Oyster Cosmograph" three-line block at 12 Most common configuration across the run
Standard reverse panda Cosmograph Silver-white dial, black sub-dials, same text block Less common than panda but not rare
Paul Newman exotic (Mk1) Art-deco sub-dial numerals, square chrono hashes, contrasting outer minute track Fitted intermittently from ~1966 across panda and reverse panda backgrounds, ~1 in 20 of period production
Solo dial Only the Rolex coronet and "ROLEX" word printed at 12; no "Oyster Cosmograph" line Italian collector terminology (solo = "only"); small surviving population, attribution-sensitive
"Neanderthal" Paul Newman Monochromatic black-and-white palette, larger-than-usual chrono registers, no dial lettering beyond Rolex coronet Single attributed example (case 1439122) — disputed; see Special branches

Jose Pereztroika's "Perezcope" typology runs Paul Newman dials out to Mk1.75 and beyond for the longer 6263 / 6265 chapter; the disputed Neanderthal attribution turns on whether its dial is an early prototype or a later Mk1.75 dial swapped onto an early case. Forensic detail on the dispute sits in Special branches.

Case, bezel, crystal, and crown

The case is the period-standard 36mm steel Oyster, 19mm between the lugs, and it carries the three changes that separate the 6240 from the 6239: screw-down chronograph pushers, an acrylic black bezel insert in place of the engraved metal tachymeter, and a depth rating jumped from 50m to 100m. All three changes track together. The screw-down pushers are what the depth-rating jump and the "Oyster" dial designation depend on, and the acrylic bezel insert was Rolex's chosen aesthetic for the Oyster-cased Daytona of the period.

The screw-down pushers themselves come in two generations on the 6240. The earliest, fitted only to the first-batch watches in the 1.1M to 1.3M serial band, carry the vertically grooved Millerighe knurling. From mid-1966 onward, the standard smooth cylindrical screw-down pusher takes over. Both lock into the case via a threaded tube with a rubber gasket; both unscrew counter-clockwise to operate the chronograph and screw back down to seal the case. A 6240 found with smooth pushers in the earliest serial band has either been serviced with later pushers or is misattributed.

The bezel insert is acrylic with an engraved tachymeter scale running 60 to 400 units per hour, painted white over a black background. This is the visual signature that separates the 6240 from the 6239 (engraved metal bezel, no insert) and aligns it with the 6241, the two acrylic-bezel branches of the period. The 6262 (1970 to 1971) returned briefly to the engraved metal bezel of the 6239 before the 6263 settled the line on the acrylic insert for good. The 6240's acrylic bezels are prone to cracking, fading, and edge-chipping, and a clean original bezel insert on a 6240 is a meaningful condition item.

Crystal is acrylic, period-standard. Crown is Twinlock screw-down with the period-correct Oyster signature, the same crown architecture as the contemporary Submariner and GMT-Master.

Bracelets, end links, and clasps

The 6240 was delivered on the 7205 Oyster rivet bracelet through most of its production. The 7205 is the 19mm rivet bracelet specifically for the Daytona / Air-King / Precision case lugs of the period; it pairs with end-link 271, identifiable by the "271" stamp on the underside. The folded-link 7835 successor, also paired with end-link 271, took over from approximately 1969, at the very end of the 6240's run, and carried into the 6262 / 6263 / 6264 / 6265 generation that followed. Some late 6240 examples may have shipped on 7835 from new; documentation is too thin to call this a clean transition.

Both bracelets used the small-logo folding clasp generation that ran from 1958 to roughly 1969. The clasp is signed inside the blade with a quarterly date code in the pre-1976 format: Roman numeral quarter plus two-digit year, e.g. "II.66" for the second quarter of 1966. The clasp dates the bracelet, not the watch head; period-correct clasps carry codes within or close to the watch's serial-derived production year.

The US-market alternative bracelet was a Connecticut-made hollow-rivet 19mm with unmarked end-pieces, lighter gauge than the Swiss 7205, sold by US Rolex agents from 1959 to 1979. These are not Rolex-stamped and are a known collector lead but not original-equipment.

Special branches

Orologi & Market April 1998 page documenting the Neanderthal
Singer dial-stamp comparison
Phillips Daytona Ultimatum 2018 Neanderthal lot

The "Neanderthal" 6240

The single most contested watch in the 6240 corpus is case 1439122, sold by Phillips at the May 2018 Daytona Ultimatum sale in Geneva for CHF 3,012,500. Phillips and Pucci Papaleo (who curated the sale) presented the watch as the earliest known Paul Newman dial: a transitional prototype that bridged the standard Cosmograph dial and the serially produced Paul Newman dials that began appearing in the 1.5-million serial band. SJX's preview described it as the ancestor of the Paul Newman dial — monochromatic black-and-white palette, larger-than-usual chrono registers, no dial lettering beyond the Rolex coronet at 12. The Phillips lot essay treated it as canonical.

In November 2022, Jose Pereztroika ("Perezcope") published a forensic dossier challenging that attribution. The smoking-gun evidence was a photograph in Orologi & Market magazine no. 8, April 1998, page 44, which shows what Perezcope reads as the same dial, matched by stains, scratches, and other condition markers, installed in a different watch (a 6239 or 6262). Perezcope's broader analysis pointed to dial-feature inconsistencies with the early-prototype framing: the flat "T SWISS T" designation matches later Mk1.75 Paul Newman dials rather than the wide tritium designation of early serial-production dials; the typeface of the "2" in the 30-minute sub-dial matches Mk1.75; the monochromatic minute track (without the red of early black dials) is a 6262 / 6264 trait; and the Singer maker stamp shows the rounded letterforms of late Paul Newman ROC Mk1.75 dials, not the "Singer Brevets AV" of the earliest Daytona dials. Perezcope inspected the watch in person at the Singapore preview and reported no visible traces of removed text.

Perezcope reached out to Aurel Bacs and Pucci Papaleo with the findings; no public correction or buyer notification has been issued by either party as of the dossier's publication. The dispute remains live: Phillips's lot essay and Pucci Papaleo's published taxonomy treat the Neanderthal as the earliest Paul Newman 6240, and Perezcope's documented analysis treats the dial as a later swap onto an early case. The case-and-movement period-correctness of 1439122 is not contested; the dispute is dial-only.

Solo dials

The Solo dial, with only the Rolex coronet and "ROLEX" word printed at 12 and no "Oyster Cosmograph" line, surfaces in small numbers across early manual-wind Daytona references. Perezcope's earlier work documented at least one Solo example with the "Cosmograph" line erased, and the Italian collector tradition (solo = "only") treats Solo dials as a known small-population variant rather than a single nicknamed example. Documented 6240 Solo examples are scarce and almost always carry attribution caveats. The dial's removal of standard text makes it a high-risk variant for retroactive modification.

JPS-style configurations

The John Player Special (JPS) black-and-gold dial colourway is most strongly associated with the 14k yellow gold 6241 (the pump-pusher Oyster-bezel sibling), where Revolution's bench-side examination documents fewer than 400 produced for the North American market. JPS-aligned configurations on the 6240 — a screw-down pusher Daytona with the JPS palette — are not part of the canonical Pucci Papaleo / Phillips taxonomy and surface only as one-off attributions; treat any 6240 marketed as JPS as requiring case, dial, and pusher provenance verification before relying on the attribution.

Tropical examples

Tropical 6240 dials, black dials that have aged to brown or chocolate, exist but are scarcer than tropical 6263 / 6265 examples by virtue of the smaller production population. The browning is the same lacquer-instability mechanism documented across the broader period: dials intended to be black where the black pigment was unstable in the lacquer mix, or where light, heat, and humidity drove the colour change. Tropical examples carry significant premium where the case, movement, and pushers are all period-correct.

Historical market and auction record

The 6240 sits in the highest tier of vintage Daytona prices despite its short production run, partly because the screw-down-pusher / acrylic-bezel combination is the rarest configuration of the Paul Newman era, and partly because the Neanderthal lot pulled the entire reference's price ceiling upward in 2018. The CHF 3,012,500 hammer at Phillips' Daytona Ultimatum (case 1439122, May 2018) is the headline number for the reference, even with the dial-attribution dispute attached. The Christie's "Daytona Lesson One" sale in November 2013, the marker the modern Daytona market traces its run-up from, included a 6240 in its 50-lot Daytona-only catalogue and contributed to the reference's collector position alongside the 6263 record set in the same sale.

Standard Cosmograph-dialled 6240s in good condition trade well below the Paul Newman tier but well above contemporary 6239s with comparable dials, reflecting the smaller production population and the Oyster-format premium. Mk0 Millerighe-pusher first-batch examples carry an additional premium where the pushers are documented as period-original. As with the rest of the manual-wind Daytona corpus, condition of the acrylic bezel insert, originality of the dial and pushers, and the presence of period-correct bracelet and clasp drive the spread between the high and low examples by an order of magnitude or more.

Sources

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