Events
The laws, wars, standards, crises and industrial shifts that changed how watches were made, and how the world kept time. Each is a turning point with a before and an after, in order.
- The Longitude Act
The British law of 1714 that offered up to £20,000 for a way to find longitude at sea, and the Board of Longitude that judged the claims until 1828: the prize behind John Harrison’s timekeepers and the marine chronometer.
- Japan adopts equal hours
The proclamation of 9 November 1872 by which Japan’s Grand Council of State replaced the lunisolar calendar with the solar, Gregorian one and the seasonal hours with twenty-four equal hours from 1 January 1873, leaving the wadokei without a purpose and opening the country to Western clocks and watches.
- The Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition
The world’s fair at Philadelphia in 1876 where Swiss watchmakers met the American factories on show, and the reports that followed: Jacques David’s confidential study of Waltham and Elgin for the Jura industrialists and Edouard Favre-Perret’s report to the Federal Council, which, as the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland describes it, set the Swiss industry on the road to series production.
- Railroad standard time
How North America’s railroads replaced dozens of local times with standard time zones on 18 November 1883, how their crews’ watches came under inspection after the Kipton collision of 1891, and how the zones became federal law in 1918.
- The International Meridian Conference
The conference of more than twenty nations in Washington in October 1884 that recommended the meridian through the Greenwich transit instrument as the zero of longitude, and a universal day counted from its midnight; San Domingo voted against, France and Brazil abstained, and countries then adopted Greenwich-based time on their own terms over the next three decades.
- The First World War
How the war of 1914 to 1918 met the watch: officers took to luminous wristlets, armies timed their attacks by the watch, Swiss and American factories made fuses, Britain taxed imported watches and Europe put its clocks forward; most accounts credit the war with making the wristwatch a man’s watch, though it did not invent it.
- The Swiss watch cartel and statute
The private cartel of the Swiss watch industry and the federal rules that enforced it, from the conventions of 1 December 1928 to the end of the watch statute on 31 December 1971: permits to export parts and to open or change a watch firm from 1934, minimum prices binding on every firm from 1936 to 1951, then a staged opening from 1962.
- The Second World War
How the war of 1939 to 1945 put every watch industry to work: national specifications, factories turned to fuses and chronometers in Germany, Britain, the United States, Japan and the Soviet Union, neutral Switzerland supplying both sides, and Glashütte destroyed at its end.
- The quartz crisis
The economic shock of the 1970s and early 1980s, when quartz watches went on sale, became cheap within a few years and were made in volume in Japan and Hong Kong, while Swiss watch exports and jobs collapsed.
- Glashütte after reunification
How Glashütte’s single East German watch works became a group of private companies between 1990 and 1994: the Treuhand made the state company a GmbH and sold it in 1994 as Glashütte Original, while Walter Lange and Günter Blümlein refounded A. Lange & Söhne and NOMOS and Mühle-Glashütte were set up beside it.
- The luxury-group consolidation
The fifteen months, from September 1999 to December 2000, in which three groups took over long-established watch houses and several of the few firms that still made their own movements: the Swatch Group bought Breguet with Nouvelle Lemania and then Glashütte Original and Jaquet Droz, LVMH formed a watch group around TAG Heuer, Ebel, Chaumet and Zenith, and Richemont bought the holding that owned IWC, Jaeger-LeCoultre and A. Lange & Söhne.
- The ETA supply dispute
The eighteen years in which the Swatch Group’s movement maker ETA set out to stop supplying ébauches and movements to the rest of the Swiss watch industry, and the Competition Commission held it to a slower exit: from the announcement of July 2002, through settlements in 2004 and 2013, to the decision of July 2020 that left ETA free to choose its customers, by which time Sellita and other makers had grown into alternatives.
- The pandemic watch boom and correction
The years from 2020 in which the pandemic first stopped the Swiss watch trade, then drove it to record exports, a boom and correction in second-hand prices, and the end of its Basel trade fair, and left Swiss watchmaking selling fewer watches at a far higher value.