A 95-year-old dairy farmer living in England lost his Rolex to a greedy cow 50 years ago. The strap of the Rolex was loose and it must have fallen into the grass while he was working in the field. The family thought the piece of jewelry was lost forever. However, with the help of two experts, including a Twitch streamer, the man gets his beloved watch back.
The title image is a symbolic image: It is from el_duderino123 from Pixabay.
How did he lose the watch?
- As the page “The Scottish Farmer” reports, the dairy farmer James Steele lost his Rolex while working in the field 50 years ago.
- Although he searched for days, he could not find the watch in 1974. He suspected that a cow might have found and swallowed the watch that had fallen into the grass. Apparently, the strap was loose.
- The watch, a Rolex Air-King Super Precision 5500, he had bought for £100 Sterling at that time. The purchasing power of that amount would be around €1,600 today. He earned the money by delivering milk for years. The farmer decided to buy a new Rolex and thought he would never find the old one again. As can be seen in pictures (via horolonimics), he still wears his “new” Rolex today.
An insane story about 400 USB sticks protruding from house walls is told in this video:
Son engages experts to search for old coins on his land
This is how the watch was found: The missing Rolex became a legend over the decades, which the farmer’s children told each other.
James Steele’s son, Andrew Steele, ultimately took over the farm. He decided to have his field searched for old coins because as a child he had discovered a coin from 1789 and since then developed a penchant for such historical artifacts.
Andrew engaged a metal detection expert who had previously found old coins: Liam King.
King repeatedly searched the field over a period of 9 months but could not find any coins. However, he found many other things and also that legendary watch that had long been given up for lost.
Cow apparently really ate the watch
However, the watch was no longer in good condition. It is indeed believed that the watch was swallowed by a cow and passed through all 4 stomachs in the ruminant’s digestive tract, eventually ending up in the field, which was plowed every 3 years.
The watch had stopped at 12:40 and had now turned completely green.
The watch was not in good condition:
Dutch Twitch streamer restores the Rolex
What happened to the watch? Andrew, the farmer’s son, engaged another expert: Kalle Slaap, a Dutch specialist in the restoration of mechanical watches and a content creator on Twitch and YouTube.
When the expert heard about the watch, he took it to his workshop in Grootschermer and worked on the restoration of the Rolex for 2 months. The progress of the repair can be followed on his YouTube channel. By now, the 5th update on “The Rolex that was eaten by a cow” has been released.
Farms and technology may not seem to go well together at first glance. In June 2023, we reported on MeinMMO about a story where a man hid 2,000 computers in a barn, which he then put up for sale on eBay: A man hid 2,200 computers in a barn for 23 years, now he sells the devices on eBay for 100 euros
