IWC Schaffhausen

Jones had managed the E. Howard watch company in Boston, and his plan was to pair Swiss craftsmen with American machinery. Watchmakers in western Switzerland were sceptical, so he built in the north instead, where the Rhine could drive the machines, and within a few years the factory was set up to make more than 10,000 movements a year for American retailers.^1, 2, 5

The venture did not pay its shareholders, and Jones went home in 1875. In 1880 the Rauschenbachs, a Schaffhausen industrial family, took over and began selling worldwide. Ernst Jakob Homberger, who had married into the family, ran the company from 1905 and in 1929 became its sole owner by buying the share of his brother-in-law, the psychiatrist C. G. Jung.^1, 2, 5

Homberger launched a Special Pilot’s Watch in 1936, with a rotating bezel for marking the time of take-off and an antimagnetic escapement, and it began a line of pilot’s watches the company still makes. Around the same time two Portuguese importers ordered large wristwatches fitted with precise pocket-watch movements: the Portugieser.^1, 2, 5

Albert Pellaton, technical director from 1944, designed an automatic winding that uses the rotor’s movement in both directions, and a soft-iron inner case that keeps magnetic fields away from the movement. Both went into the Ingenieur of 1955, the watch that ties IWC to Tool-watch engineering.^{1, 2, 9, 10}

In the 1970s the price of gold, a strong franc and cheap quartz watches squeezed the Swiss industry, and in 1978 the German instrument maker VDO Adolf Schindling bought IWC. VDO brought in Günter Blümlein, who turned the company back towards mechanical watches: a perpetual calendar by the head watchmaker Kurt Klaus in 1985, a Grande Complication in 1990, and cases of titanium and ceramic.^1, 2, 5

By 2000 IWC sat in Les Manufactures Horlogères, a holding shared with Jaeger-LeCoultre and A. Lange & Söhne and owned since 1993 by the German group Mannesmann. When Vodafone took over Mannesmann, the holding was sold to Richemont, in the watch purchases of those years. Blümlein, by then chairman of IWC’s board, died the following year.^{1, 2, 3, 7}