Companies
The watch companies: where each came from, who founded and owns it, and where it sits in the history. Grouped by country of origin, oldest first.
Switzerland
- Blancpain
A maker of mechanical watches in the Vallée de Joux that dates its beginning to Villeret in 1735.
- Vacheron Constantin
A Geneva watchmaker that dates itself to 1755, when Jean-Marc Vacheron took on an apprentice, and that has made its watches in the city and its canton ever since.
- Breguet
The house Abraham-Louis Breguet opened in Paris in 1775, maker of watches for Marie-Antoinette and Napoleon and patentee of the tourbillon.
- Longines
A watchmaker in Saint-Imier, in the Bernese Jura, whose factory of 1866–67 brought a scattered cottage trade under one roof.
- Jaeger-LeCoultre
A watch manufacturer in Le Sentier, in the Vallée de Joux in the Swiss Jura, grown from the workshop Antoine LeCoultre opened in 1833.
- Patek Philippe
The Geneva watch house founded in 1839 by Antoni Norbert Patek and Franciszek Czapek, named Patek Philippe & Cie from 1851 after Jean Adrien Philippe joined, and owned by the Stern family since the 1930s.
- Omega
A watchmaker in Biel/Bienne that grew from Louis Brandt’s workshop of 1848, timed the Olympic Games from 1932 and made the Speedmaster, the chronograph NASA qualified for its crewed missions in 1965.
- Zenith
The watch firm of Le Locle founded by Georges Favre-Jacot in 1865, which brought the watch trades together in one large works and has belonged to LVMH since 1999.
- IWC Schaffhausen
A watchmaker in Schaffhausen, in German-speaking northern Switzerland, set up in 1868 by the American Florentine Ariosto Jones to make movements for the United States.
- Audemars Piguet
The watch firm of Le Brassus in the Vallée de Joux, dated by the company to 1875, when Jules Louis Audemars opened his workshop, and run as a partnership with Edward Auguste Piguet from 1881.
- Rolex
A Geneva watch company that Hans Wilsdorf started in London in 1905 as a business selling wristwatches with Swiss movements.
- Tudor
Hans Wilsdorf’s second watch brand, registered in Geneva in 1926 and made a company in 1946, so that Rolex agents could sell a dependable watch at a lower price.
- Swatch
The Swiss plastic quartz watch launched in 1983, when the two big Swiss watch groups were near collapse under Japanese competition.
- ETA
The Swatch Group’s movement maker at Grenchen, formed from the ébauche factories of Ebauches SA; it dates itself to Fontainemelon in 1793, and its decision in 2002 to stop supplying other brands led to two decades of competition cases.
Germany
- A. Lange & Söhne
The watchmaker whose founding in 1845 started the watch industry of Glashütte, Saxony.
- Junghans
A clock and watch maker founded at Schramberg in the Black Forest in 1861, which grew on American factory methods into one of the largest clock factories in the world, made wristwatches and chronometers in the twentieth century, and brought out radio-controlled clocks and watches from 1985.
- Mühle-Glashütte
A Glashütte family firm that began by making measuring instruments for the town’s watchmakers.
- Laco
A Pforzheim watchmaker that grew out of Lacher & Co., one of the five makers of the German air force’s observation watch in the Second World War.
- Stowa
A Pforzheim watchmaker named after its founder, Walter Storz.
- Tutima
A Glashütte watchmaker whose name began as a quality mark of the town’s UROFA and UFAG factories, best known for a wartime pilot’s chronograph.
- Sinn
A Frankfurt watchmaker founded in 1961 by Helmut Sinn, a former wartime pilot who taught instrument flying.
- Glashütte Original
The Glashütte watchmaker that is the legal successor to VEB Glashütter Uhrenbetriebe, the East German combine into which the town’s firms were merged in 1951.
- Nomos Glashütte
An independent, owner-run watchmaker founded in Glashütte in 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
- Damasko
A watchmaker in Barbing, near Regensburg, making watches since 1994, whose cases are built on a hardened steel its founder patented.
- Moritz Grossmann
A Glashütte watchmaker founded in 2008 by the watchmaker Christine Hutter under the name of Moritz Grossmann, the nineteenth-century Glashütte watchmaker behind the German School of Watchmaking.
United States
- Waltham
The Massachusetts company, begun at Roxbury in 1849–50 and at Waltham from 1854, that showed watches could be made by machine from interchangeable parts.
- Hamilton
The Lancaster, Pennsylvania, maker founded in 1892 that built its name on railroad watches, sold an electric watch in 1957 and the Pulsar digital watch in the 1970s, then moved to Switzerland; it is now a brand of the Swatch Group, based in Biel.
United Kingdom
- Smiths
The London watch retailer of 1851 that grew into the instrument maker Smiths and, from the 1930s, Britain’s main maker of clocks and watches, at Cheltenham and, with Ingersoll, at Ystradgynlais in Wales, until the last factory closed in 1980.
- Lancashire Watch Company
The Prescot company led by T. P. Hewitt that tried, from 1889, to answer American and Swiss factory watches by making complete watches under one roof; it never made a profit and failed in 1910 or early 1911.
Italy
- Panerai
A watchmaker that began as a Florentine watch shop in 1860 and for decades supplied the Italian Navy with instruments and diving watches.
France
- Lip
The Besançon watch company founded by Emmanuel Lipmann in 1867, which presented an electric watch developed with Elgin in 1952 and whose collapse in 1973 led its workers to occupy the factory and sell the watches themselves.
Japan
- Seiko
A Tokyo watch company that grew from a clock shop opened in 1881 and came to make all its watches in its own factories.
- Citizen
A Tokyo watch company that grew from a watch research institute set up in 1918 and took its name from its 1924 pocket watch.
- Casio
A Tokyo electronics company that came to watches from calculators.
- Orient
A Japanese watch brand founded at Hino, Tokyo, in 1950 as the successor to Shogoro Yoshida’s import shop of 1901 and its Toyo Tokei factory, known for mechanical watches and the Orient Star, and owned by Seiko Epson since 2009.
- Grand Seiko
Seiko’s high-accuracy line, introduced in 1960 and a brand of its own within the Seiko group since 2017.
Soviet Union
- Poljot (First Moscow Watch Factory)
The Moscow factory founded in 1930 as the First State Watch Factory on machinery from Dueber-Hampden of Canton, Ohio, named after Kirov in 1935, later the First Moscow Watch Factory, maker of the Pobeda, marine chronometers and the Poljot watches; Russian Wikipedia says it stopped making watches in 2005.
- Vostok
The watch factory at Chistopol on the Kama, in Tatarstan, which grew from a Moscow watch factory evacuated in 1941, supplied the Soviet army with the Komandirskie from 1965 and, Wikipedia records, has sold its watches as Vostok since 1969.
China
- Sea-Gull (Tianjin)
The Tianjin watchmaker that grew from the trial group of 1955, made the air force chronograph of the 1960s and the Dongfeng, and became, by its own account, China’s largest maker of mechanical movements, supplying assemblers abroad and making tourbillons and repeaters.
- Shanghai Watch Factory
The Shanghai factory, founded in 1958 from the city’s 1955 trial group, whose A581 and later standard-movement watches were sold across the planned economy; a joint-stock company since 2000.
India
- Titan
An Indian watch company founded in 1984 as a joint venture of the Tata Group and the Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation, which made quartz watches at Hosur from 1987, later added the Sonata and Fastrack brands and its own mechanical movements, and was called Titan Industries until 2013.