The TR-900 is a 41 mm sandblasted stainless steel diver with a black dial, an elapsed-time rotating bezel, a moisture indicator at 6 o’clock and antimagnetic protection. Inside is the automatic Anton Schild AS 1361, a 17-jewel workhorse with hacking seconds. The lume is promethium-147 rather than radium or tritium, and the case back is stamped Tornek-Rayville U.S. with the reference and issue numbering — markings that make surviving examples easy to identify and almost impossible to fake convincingly.

Its origin is a procurement problem. The US Navy’s MIL-W-22176A specification of 1961 demanded a watch that survived its dive tests, and the Blancpain Fifty Fathoms was the only design that passed — but American law required military goods to be bought domestically. Allen V. Tornek, Blancpain’s US distributor, solved it by creating the Tornek-Rayville name (an anagram of Villeret) and having the watches assembled and finished in the United States. Around 780 were delivered in 1964 and roughly 300 more in 1966, issued to Navy SEALs, Marine Force Recon and MACV-SOG units in Vietnam, and the Navy destroyed most of them in the 1970s.

Collectors call the TR-900 the rarest and most desirable Fifty Fathoms variant, and the market agrees: a circa-1966 example sold at Phillips Geneva in 2020 for CHF 112,500 against a CHF 40,000–90,000 estimate, and dealers have listed original pieces around $115,000–120,000. The watch has been out of production since the 1960s, but the Tornek-Rayville name has been revived for modern tool watches, so the badge survives even though the Navy contract does not.