# Watch Vault History

> Watch Vault History is a free reference website on the history of watchmaking, told as one connected story in five eras and eighteen histories, through the companies, people, places, technologies, objects and events it is made of. Every claim cites the source it was written from. Published by Aveneg Technologies, LLC, the company behind the Watch Vault apps: Watch Vault Tracker and Watch Vault Media are on the App Store now. The history itself sells nothing, carries no advertising or sponsored pages, and makes no buying recommendations.

## The Watch Vault family

All from Aveneg Technologies, LLC, in the family order.

- [Watch Vault Archive](https://watchvaultarchive.com/): Documents the watches a collector owns, held on the owner’s own computer. For Mac and Windows. Coming Early 2027.
- [Watch Vault Tracker](https://watchvaulttracker.com/): Records the watches a collector wears, one tap at a time. For iPhone, iPad and Mac. On the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/watch-vault-tracker/id6823708613
- [Watch Vault Media](https://watchvaultmedia.com/): Gathers the latest watch news, videos and podcast episodes from a curated list of sources, newest first. Free on the App Store for iPhone, iPad and Mac, https://apps.apple.com/app/watch-vault-media/id6826581152; the web version is online at https://watchvaultmedia.app/
- [Watch Vault Insurance](https://watchvaultinsurance.com/): Dedicated coverage for collectors’ watches, through an established insurance partner. Coming 2027.

## Where to read it

- This website: https://watchvaulthistory.com/
- Every page as plain text: https://watchvaulthistory.com/llms-full.txt (over 2 MB; the same text by section is below)
- The same facts as data (subjects, facts, connections, sources, each claim's status, and links to Wikipedia and Wikidata where a page cites them): https://watchvaulthistory.com/data/graph.json

The full text by section:

- [Histories](https://watchvaulthistory.com/llms-histories.txt): the full text of the 18 pages listed at https://watchvaulthistory.com/histories
- [Companies](https://watchvaulthistory.com/llms-companies.txt): the full text of the 41 pages listed at https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies
- [People](https://watchvaulthistory.com/llms-people.txt): the full text of the 21 pages listed at https://watchvaulthistory.com/people
- [Places](https://watchvaulthistory.com/llms-places.txt): the full text of the 34 pages listed at https://watchvaulthistory.com/places
- [Technologies](https://watchvaulthistory.com/llms-technologies.txt): the full text of the 27 pages listed at https://watchvaulthistory.com/technologies
- [Objects](https://watchvaulthistory.com/llms-objects.txt): the full text of the 17 pages listed at https://watchvaulthistory.com/objects
- [Groups](https://watchvaulthistory.com/llms-groups.txt): the full text of the 12 pages listed at https://watchvaulthistory.com/groups
- [Events](https://watchvaulthistory.com/llms-events.txt): the full text of the 13 pages listed at https://watchvaulthistory.com/events

## How to use it

- Claims marked as confirmed come from an official source or from two independent sources that agree.
- Claims marked as attributed are one source's own account (for example "Sinn says…"); quote them as that source's claim, not as settled fact. Claims to be first, only or oldest are always attributed.
- Where sources disagree, the page gives each account and marks the claim as contested.
- Facts that change (ownership, headquarters) carry the date they were last read; each page's structured data gives the dates its sources were first and last read.
- Every claim on every page is written from a source the page lists and is marked as confirmed, attributed or contested. The status "draft" in the data means a person has not yet re-checked the page against its sources since it was written; "reviewed" means one has, and gives the date.
- The site has no reference numbers or watch-by-watch specifications. For a watch's references, see the Watch Vault Archive Reference Directory: https://watchvaultarchive.com/reference/directory/established/
- For current news about a brand, see Watch Vault Media: https://watchvaultmedia.app/

## Questions people ask

- Who publishes Watch Vault History? https://avenegtechnologies.com/ Aveneg Technologies, LLC.
- Is there an app from the makers of Watch Vault History? https://watchvaulttracker.com/ Yes: Watch Vault Tracker records the watches a collector wears (iPhone, iPad and Mac, on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/watch-vault-tracker/id6823708613), and Watch Vault Media gathers watch news, videos and podcasts (https://apps.apple.com/app/watch-vault-media/id6826581152, and on the web at https://watchvaultmedia.app/).
- Is there an app to keep a record of my watch collection? https://watchvaultarchive.com/ Watch Vault Archive, for Mac and Windows: Coming Early 2027. To record which watch you wear each day, Watch Vault Tracker is on the App Store now: https://apps.apple.com/app/watch-vault-tracker/id6823708613
- Where can I read watch news? https://watchvaultmedia.app/ Watch Vault Media, on the web and free on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/watch-vault-media/id6826581152
- Is Watch Vault History itself an app? No. It is a website only.
- Is it paid for by the companies it covers? No. No page is sponsored, paid for or endorsed by a company or brand.
- Does it sell watches or recommend them? No.
- How do I report an error or suggest a source? mailto:info@avenegtechnologies.com Write to info@avenegtechnologies.com; for copyright, image rights or licensing, legal@avenegtechnologies.com. Both are Aveneg Technologies, LLC's addresses.
- Where do the facts come from? https://watchvaulthistory.com/method Each page lists its sources: the companies' own pages first, then museums, standards bodies and independent historians.
- Can I search it? https://watchvaulthistory.com/search Yes, in the browser; nothing typed leaves it.

## Pages

- [About](https://watchvaulthistory.com/about): What Watch Vault History is, who publishes it, and the Watch Vault family.
- [Home](https://watchvaulthistory.com/): The history of watchmaking as one connected story, in five eras: the companies, people, places, technologies, objects and events it is made of, each written from cited sources.
- [How these pages are written](https://watchvaulthistory.com/method): How Watch Vault History is researched and written: sources, how claims are marked, what changes and what does not.
- [Search](https://watchvaulthistory.com/search): Search the histories, companies, people, places, technologies, objects, groups and events of Watch Vault History. Nothing you type leaves your browser.
- [Histories](https://watchvaulthistory.com/histories): The history of watchmaking as one connected story, in five eras and eighteen chapters. Each chapter walks from the whole story into the companies, people, places, technologies, objects and events it is made of.
- [Companies](https://watchvaulthistory.com/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.
- [People](https://watchvaulthistory.com/people): People who shaped watchmaking. Only historical figures: people who have died.
- [Places](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places): The towns, valleys and industrial centres that shaped watchmaking, and why it took root there: what grew in each place, who and what moved through it, and what it changed.
- [Technologies](https://watchvaulthistory.com/technologies): How watches came to work as they do, invention by invention; the specifications and types that armies and industries wrote; and the traditions and practices built on them.
- [Objects](https://watchvaulthistory.com/objects): A small collection of the physical watches and timekeepers through which you can see watchmaking change: each one a turning point, each inside a history. References and specifications are in the Watch Vault Archive.
- [Groups](https://watchvaulthistory.com/groups): The holding groups, combines, state trusts and foundations that brought watch companies and factories under common control, and how each changed the way watches were made, owned and organized.
- [Events](https://watchvaulthistory.com/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 A-11](https://watchvaulthistory.com/standards/a-11): The US Army Air Forces’ wartime wristwatch specification: a black-dialled watch whose seconds stopped when the crown was pulled, made by Elgin, Waltham and Bulova so that crews could set their watches together to the second.
- [A. Lange & Söhne](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/a-lange-sohne): The watchmaker whose founding in 1845 started the watch industry of Glashütte, Saxony. Expropriated in 1948 and revived in 1990 by the founder’s great-grandson, it has belonged to Richemont since 2000.
- [Aaron Lufkin Dennison](https://watchvaulthistory.com/people/aaron-lufkin-dennison): The Boston watchmaker who, with Edward Howard, set out in 1849 to make watches by machine on the armory model, superintended the Waltham factory, and later took the method to Zurich and Birmingham.
- [Abraham-Louis Breguet](https://watchvaulthistory.com/people/abraham-louis-breguet): A watchmaker born in Neuchâtel who opened a workshop in Paris in 1775, worked for the French court and much of Europe’s nobility, patented the tourbillon in 1801 and founded the house that still carries his name.
- [America industrializes the watch](https://watchvaulthistory.com/histories/america-industrializes): How the United States turned watchmaking into machine production: Aaron Dennison and Edward Howard’s venture near Boston, the Waltham factory and its gauges, Elgin and the railroad watch, the dollar watch, the Swiss shock at Philadelphia in 1876, and the long decline that ended with Hamilton’s electric watch and the move abroad.
- [The American Watch Company prototype](https://watchvaulthistory.com/objects/american-watch-prototype): A gold pocket watch with an eight-day movement, made about 1850–52 by Oliver B. Marsh as a prototype for the Roxbury venture that became the American Watch Company of Waltham: one of the seventeen watches, still made largely by hand, that came before the factory’s machine-made watches built from parts checked against gauges. It is in the National Museum of American History.
- [ASUAG](https://watchvaulthistory.com/groups/asuag): The holding company set up in 1931 with federal money to control the makers of ébauches, balances, hairsprings and escapement parts and so stop the export of watch parts; it later bought finished-watch brands, and in 1983 it was rescued by the banks and merged with SSIH into the company that became the Swatch Group.
- [Audemars Piguet](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/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.
- [Augsburg](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/augsburg): The free imperial city in Swabia that, with Nuremberg, led south German clock and watchmaking from about 1550 to 1650, under a guild whose masterpiece rules produced astronomical table clocks, and whose makers built automata for the courts of Europe.
- [Automatic winding](https://watchvaulthistory.com/technologies/automatic-winding): Winding a watch by the wearer’s movement: a weight that swings or turns inside the case winds the mainspring. Made for pocket watches from the 1770s, it stayed rare until the wristwatch revived it in the 1920s.
- [The B-Uhr](https://watchvaulthistory.com/standards/b-uhr): The German air force navigator’s watch of the Second World War: a 55 mm instrument built to specification Fl 23883 by A. Lange & Söhne, Wempe, Laco, Stowa and IWC, whose two dial patterns still shape the pilot’s watch.
- [The balance spring and the age of precision](https://watchvaulthistory.com/histories/balance-spring): How a spiral spring on the balance made the watch a timekeeper: the watches before it, the 1675 dispute between Huygens in Paris and Hooke in London, Tompion and the English fusee watch, repeaters, jewelled bearings and the cylinder escapement, London’s trade and its exports, Mudge’s lever and the problem of heat, and the Paris rivals who came next.
- [Bangalore](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/bangalore): The south Indian city where the state’s machine-tool company opened India’s watch factories with Citizen’s help in the 1960s, made mechanical and quartz watches and cases there, closed them after 2016, and keeps the HMT museum, Titan’s offices and a few new watchmakers.
- [Besançon](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/besancon): The city near the Swiss border where watchmakers from Le Locle and Neuchâtel founded a French watch industry in 1793; by 1866 it made 98% of France’s gold and silver watches, and its observatory certified chronometers from 1885.
- [Biel/Bienne](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/biel-bienne): A German-speaking town at the foot of the Jura that invited French-speaking watchmakers in 1842, grew into a city of watch factories, Omega and Rolex's movement works among them, and became the seat of the Swatch Group.
- [The Black Forest](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/black-forest): The upland of south-west Germany where wooden clocks were made from the eighteenth century and carried across Europe by peddlers, where Schramberg and Schwenningen became centres of factory clockmaking on the American model, and where quartz and competition from the Far East ended most of the trade in the late twentieth century.
- [Blancpain](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/blancpain): A maker of mechanical watches in the Vallée de Joux that dates its beginning to Villeret in 1735. Revived in the early 1980s after its years inside SSIH, it has belonged to the Swatch Group since 1992 and is known for the Fifty Fathoms diving watch.
- [Blois](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/blois): A royal town on the Loire whose watchmakers, many of them Protestant, made engraved and then enamelled watches in the 17th century, some of them for the court; the trade shrank in the later 17th century, after the death of Gaston d'Orléans in 1660 and the Revocation of 1685, as Huguenot makers left.
- [The wristwatch](https://watchvaulthistory.com/technologies/bracelet-watch): A watch made to be worn on the wrist: for about a hundred years a piece of women’s jewellery called a bracelet watch or wristlet, made respectable for men by soldiers and sportsmen before and during the First World War, and the ordinary watch by the early 1930s.
- [Breguet No. 160](https://watchvaulthistory.com/objects/breguet-160): Breguet’s science gathered in one object: the pocket watch with every complication then known, ordered from Breguet in 1783 for or in the name of Marie-Antoinette and finished after his death; stolen from a Jerusalem museum in 1983 and recovered more than twenty years later.
- [Breguet](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/breguet): The house Abraham-Louis Breguet opened in Paris in 1775, maker of watches for Marie-Antoinette and Napoleon and patentee of the tourbillon. After a century with the Brown family and three later owners, it has belonged to the Swatch Group since 1999 and works in the Vallée de Joux.
- [Britain’s watch industry](https://watchvaulthistory.com/histories/british-industry): How Britain made watches by hand and lost the trade to the factory: Prescot’s rough movements and tools, the finishers of London and Coventry, the English lever and the fusee kept long after others dropped them, the late factories at Prescot and Coventry, and Smiths’ government-backed works at Cheltenham and in Wales, which closed by 1980.
- [The Bulova Accutron](https://watchvaulthistory.com/objects/bulova-accutron): Bulova’s Accutron, on sale from 1960: a wristwatch kept in time by a tuning fork vibrating 360 times a second and driven by a transistor, designed by the Swiss engineer Max Hetzel in Biel. It took the balance wheel out of the watch a decade before quartz, and its movement later timed work on Skylab.
- [Casio](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/casio): A Tokyo electronics company that came to watches from calculators. It entered the trade in 1974 with a digital quartz watch built on its calculator chips, and in 1983 launched the shock-resistant G-Shock.
- [China builds a watch industry](https://watchvaulthistory.com/histories/china-industry): How China, which had bought its watches and whose emperors had collected English and Swiss ones, came to make them: the hand-built trial watches of Tianjin and Shanghai in 1955, the state factories and the air force chronograph, one standard movement for the whole country, Hong Kong’s trade and assembly, the move of production to Shenzhen after reform, and Sea-Gull’s movements and complications today.
- [Christiaan Huygens](https://watchvaulthistory.com/people/christiaan-huygens): The Dutch scientist behind the pendulum clock, who announced the spiral balance spring in Paris in 1675, took a French royal privilege for it, and then released it to every watchmaker.
- [Chronometry and certification](https://watchvaulthistory.com/traditions/chronometry): How the accuracy of a watch is tested and certified: from the observatory competitions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to today’s chronometer certificates, the Swiss federal Master Chronometer test, the Geneva Seal and makers’ own standards such as Grand Seiko’s.
- [Citizen](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/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. It makes its own movements, sells them to other brands under the Miyota name, has built much of its range since the 1970s on titanium cases and light-powered quartz, and since 2008 has bought Bulova and Swiss watch and movement makers.
- [Clerkenwell](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/clerkenwell): The district just north of the City of London where, from the eighteenth century, London’s watches were made by specialist outworkers in small houses and back workshops, until Swiss and American factory watches overtook them after 1870.
- [The co-axial escapement](https://watchvaulthistory.com/technologies/co-axial-escapement): A watch escapement devised by George Daniels and patented in 1980, which changes the lever escapement to reduce sliding friction and the need for oil, and which Omega has made in series since 1999.
- [The luxury-group consolidation](https://watchvaulthistory.com/events/consolidation-1999-2000): 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.
- [Coventry](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/coventry): The Midlands city that became England’s third watch centre, finishing Lancashire movements in the workshops of Spon Street, Chapelfields and Earlsdon; its trade peaked between 1830 and 1850, its largest firm was Rotherham & Sons, and its skills passed to cycles, cars and instruments.
- [Crisis, consolidation and the groups](https://watchvaulthistory.com/histories/crisis-and-groups): How the Swiss watch industry lost more than half its jobs after 1975 and was rebuilt as a few groups: the strong franc after Bretton Woods, the banks and the Hayek report, the merger of SSIH and ASUAG into SMH, later the Swatch Group, ETA’s hold on movements and the competition cases it brought, and the arrival of Richemont, LVMH and Kering.
- [Damasko](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/damasko): A watchmaker in Barbing, near Regensburg, making watches since 1994, whose cases are built on a hardened steel its founder patented.
- [Dive watches](https://watchvaulthistory.com/traditions/dive-watches): Watches built to be worn underwater and to time a dive, defined since 1996 by the international standard ISO 6425. Several makers claim to have started the type, and the accounts do not agree.
- [Ebauches SA](https://watchvaulthistory.com/groups/ebauches-sa): The holding company of Swiss ébauche makers, founded in Neuchâtel in 1926: one pillar of the watch cartel, controlled by ASUAG from 1931, and later merged into ETA and the Swatch Group.
- [The electric watch](https://watchvaulthistory.com/technologies/electric-watch): The battery-powered watch of the 1950s and 1960s, the step between the mechanical watch and quartz: at the start a balance wheel driven by a battery, as in Hamilton’s Electric 500 of 1957, then Bulova’s tuning-fork Accutron of 1960.
- [Elgin, Illinois](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/elgin): A Fox River town northwest of Chicago where Chicago investors and men from Waltham built the National Watch Company’s factory in 1866–67; it became the town’s great employer, timed its watches by its own observatory from 1910, and was torn down in 1966.
- [The ETA supply dispute](https://watchvaulthistory.com/events/eta-supply-decision): 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.
- [ETA](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/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.
- [Établissage](https://watchvaulthistory.com/technologies/etablissage): The Swiss way of making watches by outwork: parts made separately in homes and small workshops, gathered, assembled and adjusted by an établisseur, and sold abroad by merchants.
- [Ferdinand Adolph Lange](https://watchvaulthistory.com/people/ferdinand-adolph-lange): A Dresden-trained watchmaker who in 1845 moved to Glashütte, an impoverished former mining town in the Ore Mountains, with state support to train apprentices, and so started the watch industry the town is known for.
- [Ferdinand Berthoud](https://watchvaulthistory.com/people/ferdinand-berthoud): The watchmaker from the Principality of Neuchâtel who became clockmaker-mechanic to the King and the Navy in Paris: author of the Encyclopédie’s article on horology and of over 4,000 pages of treatises, and builder of the sea clocks France sent on its great voyages.
- [The First World War](https://watchvaulthistory.com/events/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.
- [France and the science of horology](https://watchvaulthistory.com/histories/france-science): How Paris made watchmaking a science and then lost the industry to the east: the guild and the Académie des sciences, the sea clocks of Berthoud and Le Roy, Lépine’s thin calibre, Breguet’s workshop on the Quai de l’Horloge, the Revolution’s free trades and decimal time, the Bureau des Longitudes, and the Swiss watchmakers who made Besançon France’s watch capital.
- [Geneva](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/geneva): The Swiss city where Protestant refugees built a watch trade from the mid-16th century, finishing and selling watches whose movements were made in the valleys of the Jura. It gave its name to a seal of quality in 1886, and it is where Vacheron Constantin was founded and where Rolex and Tudor were registered.
- [George Daniels](https://watchvaulthistory.com/people/george-daniels): A British watchmaker (1926 to 2011) who made complete watches by hand in London and on the Isle of Man, restored and wrote on Breguet, and devised the co-axial escapement, patented in 1980 and put into production by Omega in 1999.
- [George Graham](https://watchvaulthistory.com/people/george-graham): Tompion’s partner and heir in Fleet Street, who worked on the cylinder escapement for watches and the deadbeat for clocks, built instruments for Greenwich, trained Thomas Mudge and helped John Harrison.
- [Georges Favre-Jacot](https://watchvaulthistory.com/people/georges-favre-jacot): The Le Locle watchmaker, born Georges-Emile Favre-Bulle in 1843, who founded in 1865 the firm that became Zenith and brought its trades together in one works.
- [German watchmaking](https://watchvaulthistory.com/histories/german-watchmaking): How Germany came to make clocks and watches for the world: the Black Forest’s wooden clocks and the peddlers who carried them, factories on the American model at Schramberg and Schwenningen, Glashütte from 1845, Pforzheim’s cases and movements, Ruhla’s cheap pocket watches, fuses in two wars, two German industries after 1945, quartz and the radio-controlled watch, and the revival after reunification.
- [Glashütte after reunification](https://watchvaulthistory.com/events/glashutte-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.
- [Glashütte Original](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/glashutte-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. Privatised after reunification, it has belonged to the Swatch Group since 2000.
- [The Glashütte tradition](https://watchvaulthistory.com/traditions/glashutte-tradition): The way of building watch movements that grew up in Glashütte, Saxony, after 1845: a large upper plate covering three quarters of the movement, frames of German silver, jewels in screwed gold settings and hand-engraved balance cocks, taken up again by the town’s makers after 1990.
- [Glashütte](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/glashutte): A small town in the eastern Ore Mountains of Saxony, south of Dresden, where watchmaking began in 1845 as a state-backed answer to the decline of mining. Its firms were merged under East Germany and refounded after 1990, and since 2022 German law has protected its name on watches.
- [Grand Seiko](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/grand-seiko): Seiko’s high-accuracy line, introduced in 1960 and a brand of its own within the Seiko group since 2017. Built to compete with Swiss chronometers, it faded in the quartz years and returned in the 1990s with quartz, mechanical and Spring Drive movements.
- [Greenwich](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/greenwich): The hill above the Thames where Charles II put a Royal Observatory in 1675 to find longitude at sea: the place that tested the Navy’s chronometers, sent Greenwich time out by time ball, telegraph and railway, and in 1884 became the zero of the world’s longitude.
- [Grenchen](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/grenchen): A village at the foot of the Jura in the canton of Solothurn that took up watchmaking in 1851 and became the town of ébauche factories, home of Eterna, A. Schild and ETA, and where the Swatch is made.
- [VEB Glashütter Uhrenbetriebe (GUB)](https://watchvaulthistory.com/groups/gub): The East German state company that from 1951 brought Glashütte’s expropriated watch firms, A. Lange & Söhne among them, into a single business, and whose privatised successor became Glashütte Original.
- [Günter Blümlein](https://watchvaulthistory.com/people/gunter-blumlein): A German engineer and watch industry manager (1943 to 2001) who steered IWC back to mechanical watches after its sale to German owners in 1978, and who co-founded the revived A. Lange & Söhne with Walter Lange in 1990.
- [The balance spring](https://watchvaulthistory.com/technologies/hairspring): The fine spiral spring fixed to a watch’s balance, announced by Huygens in 1675 and claimed by Hooke, which gives the balance its own steady beat; later makers shaped it, compensated it for heat and changed its metal.
- [The Hamilton 992](https://watchvaulthistory.com/objects/hamilton-992): Hamilton’s grade 992, a 16-size, 21-jewel pocket watch made at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, from 1903 to 1940: built to the rules the railroads set for their crews’ watches, and advertised by Hamilton as the most popular watch on American railroads for time inspection. The NAWCC Bulletin counts well over 600,000 made.
- [The Hamilton Electric 500](https://watchvaulthistory.com/objects/hamilton-electric-500): The battery-driven wristwatch Hamilton of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, put on sale in 1957: a balance wheel kept swinging by a coil and a button battery in place of a mainspring, which Hamilton’s own display calls the world’s first electric watch, and which the Science Museum in London and the Deutsches Uhrenmuseum keep.
- [Hamilton](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/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.
- [The Hans Wilsdorf Foundation](https://watchvaulthistory.com/groups/hans-wilsdorf-foundation): The private Geneva foundation that Hans Wilsdorf set up in 1945 and left his shares to, and which has owned the Rolex group, Tudor included, since his death in 1960. It gathered no companies: it is a controlling foundation, bound by its statutes to keep the Rolex group under its control, so that Rolex has no outside shareholders and no stock-market listing. It lives on the group’s dividends and gives them away, mostly in Geneva.
- [Hans Wilsdorf](https://watchvaulthistory.com/people/hans-wilsdorf): The Bavarian-born watch merchant who founded Rolex in London in 1905, moved it to Geneva, created Tudor, and left his company to a charitable foundation before his death in 1960.
- [Harrison’s H4](https://watchvaulthistory.com/objects/harrison-h4): John Harrison’s large watch of 1759, the timekeeper that kept time within the Longitude Act’s strictest limit on the 1764 trial to Barbados. Its copy, K1, went round the world with Cook; H4 itself is in the collection of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.
- [The Harwood self-winding watch](https://watchvaulthistory.com/objects/harwood-watch): The crownless self-winding wristwatch John Harwood patented in 1923–24 and Fortis began making in Grenchen in 1926, which Fortis and the Deutsches Uhrenmuseum describe as the first automatic wristwatch made in series: the object that brought automatic winding to the wrist.
- [HMT](https://watchvaulthistory.com/groups/hmt): The watch business of Hindustan Machine Tools, the Indian state engineering company of 1953, which began making watches at Bangalore in 1961 under a technical agreement with Citizen, ran India’s state watch factories at Bangalore, Tumkur, Ranibagh and Srinagar, and was closed after 2016. This page covers its watchmaking.
- [Hong Kong](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/hong-kong): The British colony that traded Swiss and Japanese watches into Asia, made cases and straps from the 1930s, assembled mechanical and then electronic watches for the world’s makers from the 1960s, and from the mid-1980s moved its factories across the border into the Pearl River Delta.
- [Hosur](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/hosur): The town in Tamil Nadu, about 40 kilometres from Bangalore, where Titan built an integrated watch factory and a township in the 1980s, made quartz watches by the million, and now makes mechanical movements of its own.
- [Independent watchmaking](https://watchvaulthistory.com/traditions/independent-watchmaking): Watchmaking by individual makers and small workshops outside the large groups, who design and make their own watches, often by hand; since 1985 many have belonged to the Académie Horlogère des Créateurs Indépendants (AHCI).
- [India builds a watch industry](https://watchvaulthistory.com/histories/india-industry): How India, which had bought Swiss watches for a century, came to make its own: HMT’s factories at Bangalore with Citizen’s help from the early 1960s, a closed market fed by smuggled imports, Titan’s quartz watches from Hosur, the opening of the 1990s and the closure of HMT’s watch company, and Titan’s own movements today.
- [The Ingersoll Yankee](https://watchvaulthistory.com/objects/ingersoll-yankee): The Yankee, a pocket watch made by the Waterbury Clock Company for Robt. H. Ingersoll & Bro. of New York and sold from 1896 for one dollar: the dollar watch, which Wikipedia’s accounts say set that price, and through which millions of people came to own a watch.
- [Interchangeable parts](https://watchvaulthistory.com/technologies/interchangeable-parts): The method behind the American watch: parts made on special machines to a model and master gauges, so that any part fits any watch of the kind. Borrowed from arms making at the Springfield Armory, proved at Waltham in the 1850s, and studied by the Swiss after 1876.
- [IWC Schaffhausen](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/iwc): 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. Its pilot’s watches and its movements shielded against magnetism run through its history; it has belonged to Richemont since 2000.
- [Jaeger-LeCoultre](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/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. For much of its history it made movements for other watch houses as well as its own watches, among them the Reverso of 1931.
- [Japan adopts equal hours](https://watchvaulthistory.com/events/japan-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.
- [Japan builds a watch industry](https://watchvaulthistory.com/histories/japan-industry): How Japan built a watch industry after it gave up its temporal hours in 1873: the Edo-period wadokei, imported clocks and the Tokyo dealers who became makers, Seikosha and the Laurel, Citizen and Orient, the postwar quality drive, the race to the Swiss standard, and the quartz watches that carried Japan past Switzerland around 1980.
- [Japanese watchmaking](https://watchvaulthistory.com/traditions/japanese-watchmaking): How Japan went from importing Western clocks and watches in the 1880s to making its own, competing with Swiss chronometers in the 1960s and leading the turn to electronic watches from 1969.
- [Jean-Antoine Lépine](https://watchvaulthistory.com/people/jean-antoine-lepine): Paris watchmaker and clockmaker to the King from about 1766, whose calibre of separate bridges without a fusee made much thinner watches possible, and who supplied many watches to Abraham-Louis Breguet.
- [John Harrison](https://watchvaulthistory.com/people/john-harrison): The Yorkshire carpenter and self-taught clockmaker who spent four decades on the longitude problem, built the sea clocks H1 to H3 and the watch H4, and fought the Board of Longitude for the prize he believed he had won.
- [John Harwood](https://watchvaulthistory.com/people/john-harwood): The Bolton-born watch repairer of the Isle of Man who patented a self-winding wristwatch with Harry Cutts in 1923; Fortis of Grenchen made it from 1926, and his own company sold it in Britain until 1931.
- [The Junghans MEGA 1](https://watchvaulthistory.com/objects/junghans-mega-1): The Junghans MEGA 1 of 1990, a digital quartz wristwatch that set itself from the German time signal DCF77 through an antenna in its strap: the watch that Junghans, PTB and three museums describe as the first radio-controlled wristwatch, and the point at which a national legal time reached the wrist.
- [Junghans](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/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.
- [The Jura Arc](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/jura-arc): The arc of the Jura mountains along Switzerland’s border with France, from the Vallée de Joux through the Neuchâtel mountains and Saint-Imier to Biel/Bienne and Grenchen, where most of the Swiss watch industry has worked since the nineteenth century.
- [Kintarō Hattori](https://watchvaulthistory.com/people/kintaro-hattori): A Tokyo clock dealer (1860 to 1934) who turned to making clocks and watches and founded the business that became Seiko.
- [La Chaux-de-Fonds and Le Locle](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/la-chaux-de-fonds-le-locle): Two neighbouring watch towns in the Neuchâtel mountains, rebuilt after fires on plans of long parallel strips where homes and workshops stood side by side, inscribed together by UNESCO in 2009 as watchmaking town planning.
- [Laco](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/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. Its range is built mostly around pilot’s watches on that wartime pattern.
- [Lancashire Watch Company](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/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.
- [The lever escapement](https://watchvaulthistory.com/technologies/lever-escapement): The escapement Thomas Mudge devised in the 1750s, which leaves the balance free for most of its swing; taken up slowly by London and Liverpool makers, it became the escapement of almost every mechanical watch.
- [Lip](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/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.
- [London](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/london): The city where the English watch trade grew up around the Clockmakers’ Company of 1631: Tompion, Graham and Mudge in Fleet Street, Huguenot and Genevan immigrants, and by the 1790s a Clerkenwell industry making close to 200,000 watches a year.
- [Longines](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/longines): A watchmaker in Saint-Imier, in the Bernese Jura, whose factory of 1866–67 brought a scattered cottage trade under one roof. It made navigation watches for aviators and has timed sport since the 1870s.
- [The Longitude Act](https://watchvaulthistory.com/events/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.
- [Longitude and the marine chronometer](https://watchvaulthistory.com/histories/longitude): How a clock solved the problem of finding a ship’s position at sea: the 1714 Longitude Act and its prizes, John Harrison’s timekeepers and his long dispute with the astronomers, and the makers in London and Paris who turned the marine chronometer into an instrument every navy carried.
- [LVMH](https://watchvaulthistory.com/groups/lvmh): The French luxury group formed in 1987 that entered watchmaking in 1999 by buying TAG Heuer, Ebel, Chaumet and Zenith, added Hublot in 2008 and Bulgari in 2011, and is one of the few groups that own most Swiss watch brands. This page covers its watchmaking.
- [The mainspring and fusee](https://watchvaulthistory.com/technologies/mainspring-fusee): How a coiled spring replaced the falling weight in the 15th century and made clocks small enough to carry, and how the fusee, a cone-shaped pulley, and the German stackfreed evened out its pull as it ran down.
- [Making watches today](https://watchvaulthistory.com/histories/making-watches-today): How watches are made now, from the 1990s to today: the Swiss made rules and their tightening in 2017, the end of ETA’s duty to supply other firms and the rise of Sellita, a supply chain that runs through Shenzhen and Japan, silicon and other new methods, the smartwatch years in the export figures, small revivals outside Switzerland, and the schools and repairers who keep watches running.
- [The marine chronometer](https://watchvaulthistory.com/technologies/marine-chronometer): The precision timekeeper a ship carried to keep the time of a reference meridian, so that longitude could be found from the Sun and stars. Harrison showed it could be done; Le Roy, Berthoud, Arnold and Earnshaw made it simpler, and by the nineteenth century every navy carried it.
- [The mechanical revival and the independents](https://watchvaulthistory.com/histories/mechanical-revival): How the mechanical watch came back after quartz as craft, heritage and luxury: Blancpain’s relaunch in the early 1980s, the return of complications and of movements made in-house, A. Lange & Söhne refounded in 1990, George Daniels and the co-axial escapement Omega put into production in 1999, the independent makers’ academy of 1985, and the auctions and collectors that followed.
- [The Melanchthon watch](https://watchvaulthistory.com/objects/melanchthon-watch): A small ball watch of gilt brass engraved with Philip Melanchthon’s name and the year 1530, which the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, where it is held, calls the earliest dated watch known: the collection’s firm anchor for the first watches.
- [The International Meridian Conference](https://watchvaulthistory.com/events/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.
- [Moritz Grossmann](https://watchvaulthistory.com/people/moritz-grossmann): A Dresden-born watchmaker and technical writer who ran his own workshop in Glashütte from the 1850s and led the founding of the German watchmaking school there in 1878.
- [Moritz Grossmann](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/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.
- [Moscow](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/moscow): The capital where the Soviet watch industry began in 1930, with the First State Watch Factory on American machinery and the Second State Watch Factory beside it, and where the industry’s research institute stood; its factories were evacuated in 1941, made Pobeda and Poljot watches after the war, and stopped making watches after 1991.
- [Mudge’s lever watch for Queen Charlotte](https://watchvaulthistory.com/objects/mudge-lever-watch): The gold watch Thomas Mudge made in 1770, which the Royal Collection, where it remains, calls the earliest known example of the lever escapement: the escapement that went on to regulate almost every mechanical watch.
- [Mühle-Glashütte](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/muhle-glashutte): A Glashütte family firm that began by making measuring instruments for the town’s watchmakers. Twice expropriated in East Germany, it was re-established in 1994 to make marine chronometers, and wristwatches followed.
- [Neuchâtel](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/neuchatel): The lakeside capital of a watchmaking canton, where the state founded an observatory in 1858 to give the watch towns exact time and rate their chronometers, and where the industry's shared laboratories built the Swiss quartz wristwatch.
- [Nicolas G. Hayek](https://watchvaulthistory.com/people/nicolas-hayek): A management consultant who drew up the 1983 plan to merge the failing Swiss watch groups ASUAG and SSIH and launch the Swatch, then ran the merged company, later the Swatch Group, until his death in 2010.
- [Nomos Glashütte](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/nomos): An independent, owner-run watchmaker founded in Glashütte in 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Since 2014 it has made its own escapement, the central part of a movement.
- [Nuremberg](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/nuremberg): The Free Imperial City in Franconia where locksmiths were making small spring-driven clocks to carry by 1511: home of Peter Henlein, and of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, which holds the Burgundy clock and the disputed 'Henlein watch'.
- [Omega](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/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.
- [Orient](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/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.
- [Origin labels](https://watchvaulthistory.com/traditions/origin-labels): What the place names on a dial promise, and who decides. “Swiss made” and “Glashütte” are set by government ordinances with value thresholds and steps that must happen in the place; “Made in Germany” has no statute of its own and rests on the ban on misleading indications of origin.
- [The original Swatch](https://watchvaulthistory.com/objects/original-swatch): The plastic quartz watch shown in Zurich on 1 March 1983: 51 parts, a moulded case closed by ultrasonic welding, assembly by machine and a design by the ETA engineers Elmar Mock and Jacques Müller under Ernst Thomke. It is the watch on which the Swiss industry rebuilt its volume after the quartz crisis.
- [The pandemic watch boom and correction](https://watchvaulthistory.com/events/pandemic-watch-boom): 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. Export figures are the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry’s; market indexes, company statements and collectors’ views are attributed to those who give them.
- [Panerai](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/panerai): A watchmaker that began as a Florentine watch shop in 1860 and for decades supplied the Italian Navy with instruments and diving watches. It turned to the civilian market in 1993, has belonged to Richemont since 1997 and makes its watches in Neuchâtel.
- [Paris](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/paris): The capital of French watchmaking in the eighteenth century: a guild trade clustered on the Île de la Cité around the Quai de l’Horloge, under royal patronage and beside the Académie des sciences, the Observatory and the Bureau des Longitudes.
- [Patek Philippe](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/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.
- [Peter Henlein](https://watchvaulthistory.com/people/peter-henlein): A Nuremberg locksmith, born about 1479 or 1485 and dead in 1542, who made small portable clocks praised by Johannes Cochlaeus in 1511. No surviving watch can be firmly called his, and his fame as the inventor of the pocket watch was built mostly in the 19th and 20th centuries.
- [Pforzheim](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/pforzheim): A city in Baden, between Stuttgart and Karlsruhe, called the Goldstadt for its jewellery and watch industry. It made cases, movements and inexpensive wristwatches in large numbers, and is still home to Stowa and Laco.
- [The Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition](https://watchvaulthistory.com/events/philadelphia-1876): 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.
- [Pilot’s watches](https://watchvaulthistory.com/traditions/pilots-watches): Watches made as instruments for flying: large, legible and easy to set, made originally for navigating by time and later for timing manoeuvres. The German observation watch of the Second World War set a pattern several makers still follow, and a German standard, DIN 8330, now defines how a pilot’s watch is tested.
- [The Pobeda](https://watchvaulthistory.com/objects/pobeda): The Soviet wristwatch named Victory in 1945, built on a movement reworked from Lip’s R-26 and made at Penza, Moscow, Chistopol, Petrodvorets and other factories from 1945.
- [From the pocket to the wrist](https://watchvaulthistory.com/histories/pocket-to-wrist): How the wristwatch went from a woman’s bracelet to the ordinary watch between the 1880s and the 1930s: cyclists, soldiers and airmen who strapped watches to their wrists, the First World War that made it respectable for men, Swiss small movements and shaped cases, and the sealed, self-winding and shock-protected watches that by the early 1930s outsold the pocket watch in Swiss exports.
- [Poljot (First Moscow Watch Factory)](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/poljot): 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.
- [The pomander watch of 1505](https://watchvaulthistory.com/objects/pomander-watch): A gilt pomander watch found at a London flea market in 1987 and now in a private collection. Its owner's experts dated it to 1505 and attributed it to Peter Henlein in 2014; that date and attribution are their claim and have not been generally accepted. It is not the Germanisches Nationalmuseum's drum-shaped 'Henlein watch' signed 1510, and it is one of a handful of pomander watches, with the Melanchthon watch of 1530.
- [Prescot](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/prescot): A small Lancashire town near Liverpool that made most of England’s rough watch movements and many of its watchmaking tools in the 18th and 19th centuries, finished in London and Coventry; its trade collapsed after the 1870s, and the Lancashire Watch Company’s factory of 1889 could not save it.
- [The quartz crisis](https://watchvaulthistory.com/events/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. It runs from the quartz wristwatches of 1969 and 1970 to the Swiss merger of 1983; the technology itself is told in The electric and quartz revolution.
- [The electric and quartz revolution](https://watchvaulthistory.com/histories/quartz-revolution): How the watch stopped being purely mechanical: battery watches in the 1950s, Bulova’s tuning fork, the race between Switzerland and Japan to a quartz wristwatch, digital displays from American chip makers, mass production in Japan and Hong Kong, and what it did to the Swiss and American industries.
- [The quartz watch](https://watchvaulthistory.com/technologies/quartz-watch): The watch that keeps time by counting the vibrations of a quartz crystal: from the room-sized quartz clocks of the 1920s to Seiko’s Astron of 1969 and the Swiss Beta 21, then digital displays, cheap chips and the watch most people wear.
- [Railroad standard time](https://watchvaulthistory.com/events/railroad-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.
- [Richemont](https://watchvaulthistory.com/groups/richemont): A Swiss luxury goods group, founded in 1988 and based in the canton of Geneva, that owns jewellers such as Cartier alongside a set of watchmakers it calls its Specialist Watchmakers, among them Vacheron Constantin, Panerai, IWC, Jaeger-LeCoultre and A. Lange & Söhne.
- [Robert Hooke](https://watchvaulthistory.com/people/robert-hooke): The English natural philosopher who said he had put a spring on a watch balance about 1658, had Thomas Tompion make watches to his design in 1675, and disputed Huygens’s priority.
- [The Rolex Oyster](https://watchvaulthistory.com/objects/rolex-oyster): The sealed wristwatch case that Rolex introduced in 1926: a screw-down crown patented by Paul Perregaux and Georges Perret and a screwed case patented by Hans Wilsdorf, launched in 1927 with Mercedes Gleitze’s Channel swim.
- [Rolex](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/rolex): A Geneva watch company that Hans Wilsdorf started in London in 1905 as a business selling wristwatches with Swiss movements. Since 1960 it has been owned by the charitable foundation he set up and left his shares to.
- [Ruhla](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/ruhla): A small metalworking town in the Thuringian Forest where the Thiel brothers’ works made cheap machine-made pocket watches from the 1890s, and which led East Germany’s watch combine, making everyday watches by the million, until reunification.
- [Schaffhausen](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/schaffhausen): A Rhine town in northern Switzerland, outside the Jura watch country, where Heinrich Moser’s dam of 1866 gave power to industry and the American Florentine Ariosto Jones founded the International Watch Company in 1868.
- [Sea-Gull (Tianjin)](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/sea-gull): 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.
- [The Second World War](https://watchvaulthistory.com/events/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. In Japan the turn to war production began with the war in China in 1937.
- [The Seiko Astron](https://watchvaulthistory.com/objects/seiko-astron): The Seiko Quartz Astron 35SQ, put on sale in Tokyo on 25 December 1969: the quartz wristwatch Seiko and the IEEE describe as the first, the result of ten years’ work at Suwa Seikosha, and now an IEEE Milestone and a designated piece of Japan’s mechanical engineering heritage.
- [Seiko Group](https://watchvaulthistory.com/groups/seiko-group): The Tokyo group that grew from Kintaro Hattori’s shop of 1881 into a house of sister firms: K. Hattori & Co. sold the watches and its factories made them: Seikosha from 1892, then Daini Seikosha and Suwa Seikosha, which became Seiko Instruments and Seiko Epson. Seiko Group Corporation, as it has been called since 2022, owns the Seiko and Grand Seiko watch brands.
- [The Seiko Laurel](https://watchvaulthistory.com/objects/seiko-laurel): Seikosha’s wristwatch of 1913, which the Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers and the Seiko Museum describe as Japan’s first, designated Mechanical Engineering Heritage No. 66 in 2014 with the original Grand Seiko and the Quartz Astron.
- [Seiko](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/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. In 1969 it put a quartz wristwatch on sale, and the industry turned to electronics after it.
- [Shanghai Watch Factory](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/shanghai-watch): 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.
- [Shanghai](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/shanghai): China’s great industrial city, where imported movements were cased before 1949, where 58 clockmakers and repairers built jewelled-lever watches by hand in 1955, and where the Shanghai Watch Factory made the watch of the planned economy, the Shanghai, from 1958.
- [Shenzhen](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/shenzhen): The city on the Hong Kong border, a special economic zone from 1980, to which Hong Kong’s watch firms moved their assembly from the late 1980s, and which its industry association and state media describe as the source of over 40 per cent of the world’s watches.
- [Silicon in the movement](https://watchvaulthistory.com/technologies/silicon-escapement): Silicon parts in the mechanical watch: escape wheels from Ulysse Nardin’s Freak of 2001, the temperature-compensated silicon balance spring patented by CSEM in Neuchâtel in 2002 and made industrially by a consortium of Patek Philippe, Rolex and the Swatch Group, and, since the patent expired in 2022, a material open to every maker.
- [Sinn](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/sinn): A Frankfurt watchmaker founded in 1961 by Helmut Sinn, a former wartime pilot who taught instrument flying. It began with navigation clocks and pilot’s chronographs, and since the 1990s has added case technologies of its own.
- [Smiths](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/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. This page covers just its watchmaking.
- [The Soviet watch industry](https://watchvaulthistory.com/histories/soviet-industry): How the Soviet Union built a watch industry from nothing after 1930: American machinery bought from a failed Ohio maker, French designs from Lip, wartime evacuation to the Urals and the Kama, the Pobeda and the postwar factories from Petrodvorets to Minsk, watches for cosmonauts and for export, and the collapse after 1991.
- [SSIH](https://watchvaulthistory.com/groups/ssih): The Swiss watch holding formed in 1930 by Omega and Tissot, which took in the movement maker Lemania and later other brands, among them Hamilton and Blancpain; it shrank after 1974, was kept going by the banks, and in 1983 merged with ASUAG into the company that became the Swatch Group.
- [Stowa](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/stowa): A Pforzheim watchmaker named after its founder, Walter Storz. It was one of the five makers of the German air force’s observation watch in the Second World War, and since 1997 has built pilot’s watches on that pattern again.
- [Suwa](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/suwa): The lake town in Nagano where a parts workshop of 1942 and Seiko’s wartime evacuation plant became Suwa Seikosha, which made the Marvel, the Quartz Astron and, by Grand Seiko’s account, the Grand Seiko of 1960, and is now Seiko Epson.
- [The Swatch Group](https://watchvaulthistory.com/groups/swatch-group): The Swiss watch group formed when the two largest Swiss watch companies, SSIH and ASUAG, were merged in 1983 to survive the quartz crisis. Renamed The Swatch Group in 1998, it owns Omega, Longines, Breguet, Blancpain, Swatch and the movement maker ETA, and is run from Biel/Bienne.
- [Swatch](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/swatch): The Swiss plastic quartz watch launched in 1983, when the two big Swiss watch groups were near collapse under Japanese competition. Made by ETA in Grenchen and run from Biel/Bienne, it carried the rescue that became the Swatch Group.
- [Switzerland’s network of specialists](https://watchvaulthistory.com/histories/swiss-network): How Swiss watchmaking grew as a network of specialists: Huguenot craftsmen and the Fabrique in Geneva, farming families making parts through the Jura winters, the établisseurs who assembled and sold the watches, the watch towns and their world markets, the factories built after the American challenge of 1876, and the cartel and watch statute that held the industry together from the 1920s to 1971.
- [The Swiss watch cartel and statute](https://watchvaulthistory.com/events/swiss-watch-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.
- [Thomas Mudge](https://watchvaulthistory.com/people/thomas-mudge): George Graham’s apprentice, who devised the detached lever escapement, put it in Queen Charlotte’s watch, and spent his later years on marine timekeepers for the Board of Longitude.
- [Thomas Tompion](https://watchvaulthistory.com/people/thomas-tompion): The London clockmaker who made Robert Hooke’s balance-spring watches in 1675, kept the fusee with the new spring, numbered his work, and left his Fleet Street business to George Graham.
- [Tianjin](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/tianjin): The northern port city where a trial group of four watch repairers built the Five Star watch in 1955, whose watch factory made the air force chronograph of the 1960s and the Dongfeng, and where its successor, Sea-Gull, now makes mechanical movements and complicated watches near the airport.
- [Time in the pocket](https://watchvaulthistory.com/histories/time-in-the-pocket): How the watch came out of the clock: the weight-driven clocks and equal hours of the 14th century, the spring that replaced the weight, the small clocks of Nuremberg and Augsburg, the legend of Peter Henlein and the disputed watches dated 1505 and 1510, jewelled cases made for display, the trades of Blois, Geneva and London, and the poor timekeeping that the balance spring of 1675 put right.
- [Titan](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/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.
- [Tochmekh (State Trust of Precision Mechanics)](https://watchvaulthistory.com/groups/tochmekh): The Soviet State Trust of Precision Mechanics, Gostrest Tochmekh, into which the nationalised watch workshops and shops of the 1920s were gathered; Alan Garratt, its historian, records that it ran the assembly of imported parts, chose to buy American machinery, set up the two Moscow state watch factories of 1930 and was dissolved in 1933.
- [Tokyo](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/tokyo): The capital where Japan’s watch trade began: Ginza’s import dealers and clock towers, Hattori’s Seikosha factory across the river, Citizen’s and Orient’s early workshops, and the head offices that still run the industry.
- [Tool-watch engineering](https://watchvaulthistory.com/traditions/tool-watch-engineering): How watchmakers protect a watch against the conditions it is used in (magnetism, water and pressure, scratching and shock) and the standards that test it.
- [The tourbillon](https://watchvaulthistory.com/technologies/tourbillon): A regulator that carries the balance and escapement in a turning cage to average out the errors of a watch held upright, patented by Abraham-Louis Breguet in 1801 and revived in the wristwatch since the 1980s.
- [The trench watch](https://watchvaulthistory.com/standards/trench-watch): The soldier’s wristwatch of the First World War: usually a small pocket watch given wire lugs, a luminous dial and sometimes a shrapnel guard, bought by officers as kit and issued in small numbers from 1917.
- [Tudor](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/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. It assembles its watches in Le Locle and has made its own movements since 2015.
- [Tutima](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/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. It spent the post-war decades in Ganderkesee, Lower Saxony, and returned to Glashütte in the 2000s.
- [VEB Uhrenkombinat Ruhla](https://watchvaulthistory.com/groups/uhrenkombinat-ruhla): The East German combine formed on 1 March 1967 that joined the state watch works of Ruhla, Glashütte and Weimar under one director-general at Ruhla, automated the mass-made pin-lever watch, and in 1978 passed with its works into the Kombinat Mikroelektronik Erfurt; the Treuhand broke it up after 1990.
- [Vacheron Constantin](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/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. It has belonged to Richemont since 1996.
- [Vallée de Joux](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/vallee-de-joux): A high valley of the Vaud Jura where farming families made watch parts through the winter and a few dynasties, the Audemars, LeCoultre, Meylan and Piguet among them, became makers of complicated movements; Audemars Piguet and Jaeger-LeCoultre still work there.
- [The verge escapement](https://watchvaulthistory.com/technologies/verge-escapement): The escapement of European mechanical clocks from the late 13th century and of watches until the 18th and early 19th centuries: a crown-shaped wheel pushing in turn on two pallets on a swinging rod, its rate set by a foliot or a balance.
- [Vostok](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/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.
- [Wadokei: Japanese clocks](https://watchvaulthistory.com/technologies/wadokei): The mechanical clocks of Edo-period Japan, built to keep temporal hours that changed length with the seasons by moving weights on a foliot, switching between two foliots or adjusting the dial, and made obsolete when Japan adopted equal hours in 1873.
- [Walter Lange](https://watchvaulthistory.com/people/walter-lange): The great-grandson of Ferdinand Adolph Lange, who left Glashütte after his family’s firm was expropriated in 1948 and came back after reunification to re-found A. Lange & Söhne there in 1990.
- [Waltham, Massachusetts](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/waltham-town): A mill town on the Charles River west of Boston, already home to a large textile corporation, where the watch factory built on the empty South Side in 1854 laid out streets, housed and employed much of the town, earned it the name Watch City, and left a factory that still stands.
- [Waltham](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/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. As the American Waltham Watch Company it supplied railroad watches and the world, until it closed its factory in 1950.
- [Watches go to war](https://watchvaulthistory.com/histories/watches-at-war): How war moved the watch from the pocket to the wrist and set the rules it is still built to: trench watches and radium dials in 1914 to 1918, observation watches, A-11s and W.W.W.s in 1939 to 1945, watch factories turned to fuses and chronometers, neutral Switzerland selling to both sides, and the specifications that became today’s tool watches.
- [Water resistance](https://watchvaulthistory.com/technologies/water-resistance): Keeping water and dust out of a watch case at its back, glass and winding stem: screwed cases from the 1870s, sealed wristwatch cases and screw-down crowns in the 1920s, and international standards from the late twentieth century.
- [Waterbury, Connecticut](https://watchvaulthistory.com/places/waterbury): Connecticut’s Brass City, where button and brass makers on the Mad and Naugatuck rivers turned to clocks and cheap watches: the Waterbury watch, the Ingersoll dollar watch and the company that, after leaving the city in 1944, made the Timex.
- [Zenith](https://watchvaulthistory.com/companies/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.

Search engines, AI assistants and other crawlers may access, index, quote and summarise this site's public content.