"In
1868, the American engineer and watchmaker, Florentine Ariosto Jones was
director of E. Howard & C0. In Boston, the America leading watch making
company. He traveled across the Atlantic to Switzerland, where his plan
was to found the International Watch Company with the aim to manufacture
movements and watch parts for the American market. However he had failed
to take into account that the workers in the Geneva region and the
remote valleys of the Jura mountains feared for their jobs and were
against Jones' intrusion.
It was probably around this point that Jones met watch manufacturer
and industrialist Johann Heinrich Moser who manufactured pocket watches
for the Russian tsars. Moser was an industrial pioneer and had recently
finished building a hydrostation in Schaffhausen powered by water from
the Rhine. Moser showed a great interest in Jones' plans and so the
foundations were set for the first and only watch manufacturers in
north-eastern Switzerland: the IWC INTERNATIONAL WATCH CO. in
Schaffhausen.
Johann Rauschenbach-Vogel, Chief Executive Officer and a machine
manufacturer from Schaffhausen, took over the INTERNATIONALE UHRENFABRIK
on 17 February 1880. This change marked the beginning of the story of
INTERNATIONAL WATCH CO., which would last almost one hundred years and
four generations, a family-owned company that would be known under
various names.
Just one year after the sale, Johann Rauschenbach-Vogel died. However
his son Johannes Rauschenbach-Schenk took over control and ran it
successfully until his own death on 2 March 1905.
Another significant person in the company history was Urs Haenggi
from Nunningen in the canton of Solothurn. In 1883 he joined IWC and
stayed with the company for 52 years. He got factory operations up and
running smoothly and acquired new customers. He was also responsible for
warding off the danger of the factory passing into other hands "in
the interest of the noble Rauschenbach family" Technician Johann
Vogel from Wangen on the Aare in Solothurn likewise played an important
role as technical director. He designed and developed IWC calibres until
1919.
In 1885 IWC produced its first digital watch based on a patent owned
by an Austrian by the name of Pallweber. The design by Pallweber was
very simple with a tiny window for the hours and minutes. Nowadays these
watches are extremely rare and sought after collector's items.
After the Second World War, the markets of Eastern Europe were lost
due to the descent of the Iron Curtain. Germany was also deemed to be a
lost market as it was in ruins and needed time to revive. Other markets
such as America, the Far East and Australia were looked at and
established. The late 1940s saw a global economic revival which saw the
Swiss watch industry flourish.
1940 saw another milestone in the history of pilot watches with the
introduction of the Big Pilot's Watch with a 52 S.C. calibre pocket
watch movement. In 2002 the modern version was launched and has proved
extremely popular.
1969 saw IWC present its first quartz wristwatch. The Da Vinci quartz
watch was fitted with a Beta 21 calibre movement. However competition
from Japan saw the Swiss watch industry fall into a crisis. IWC avoided
heavy investment in this technology and went back to produce what it was
best at - mechanical movements.
In 1978, IWC introduced the world's first titanium watch case and
bracelet, which at the time was thought impossible because of the
difficulty of working with titanium which required an oxygen-free
environment. Today, IWC manufacturers the world's most sophisticated
bracelet system, which requires neither screws nor pin and bushings to
hold the bracelet together. Instead a solid pin is held in each bracelet
link by a push-button lock on the underside of each bracelet link -
allowing the pin to be totally locked in regardless of any damage that
would normally dislodge traditional pin systems. Together with other
fanciful mechanical gadgets like mechanical depth gauges, 7 day power
reserve automatic movements, and deep-sea (2000 metres water resistant)
resistant turning crowns for internal bezels, makes IWC truly a watch
manufacturer for the future yet hand-in-hand with traditional hand
craftsmanship.
Today, IWC is most famous for its Flieger line of watches (Pilot in
German) whose design date back to World War 2 and the Portugieser line
of watches. They have approximately 390 employees and since 2000 IWC
have belonged to the watch division of Richemont SA."wikipedia.org
