“Schaffhausen is the best place on earth to make watches,” declares Georges Kern, chief executive of IWC watch company. Through the window, the mossy roofs of the old town and the 15th century Munot Castle surrounded by vineyards contrast with the sharp, minimalist style of his office.
This is no empty boast, as a stone’s throw away the Rhine flows swiftly by and it was precisely this fluvial power that attracted Florentine Ariosto Jones, the Americander of IWC, to Schaffhausen in 1868.
Odd as it may seem today, Jones’s vision for the future of watchmaking was based on a ready supply of water power and competitive salaries, both of which he found in Schaffhausen in the northern tip of Switzerland.
The adventurous 27-year-old Jones, setting off from his home town Boston, Massachusetts, headed first to Geneva. But local watchmakers, wary of this foreigner, shunned his ideas.
‘Our culture influences our watches, which are more understated and pure than in the French part of Switzerland’
Johann Heinrich Moser, who had recently built a hydro station in Schaffhausen, was looking for takers for his low-cost power supply and so Jones decided to found the International Watch Co in the 10th century town.
Today, the company employs 450 staff and produces 60,000 watches a year and its most important market is Italy and not the US, as Jones had intended.
The belts that brought the energy of the Rhine to power drills, polishing equipment and lathes are no longer strung between the building and the shore but walking down the flagstone corridors there is a palpable sense of defiant individualism.
Unlike in other watch manufactures, here the charcteristic tones of Swiss German echo through the building, as IWC is one of the few watch companies not located in the francophone Jura mountains and Geneva. “Our culture influences our watches, which are more understated and pure than in the French part of Switzerland,” explains Roland Ott, director of communications.
IWC has a strong engineering tradition and focuses on the technical elements. “For sure, design is important but we look for elegant technical solutions,” says Mr Ott. This Teutonic rigour and obsession with the technical aspect is applied to every stage of production.
An example of its technical prowess is the Portuguese perpetual calendar Ref 5021, which will be telling the time, day, date, month and southern and northern hemisphere moon phases well into the millennium all through minute calibrations of cogs, wheels and levers. It will, however, require an adjustment in 2583.
But these mechanical conundrums don’t get an easy ride. They must first pass a stringent battery of tests to earn the “Probus Scafusia” seal, the ancient mark that distinguished goods from Schaffhausen, still used by IWC on all its watches.
Bezels are rotated 16,000 times, 5kg weights are slammed into them, they are dropped into tanks of salty water and mercilessly rattled around for 16 hours and then subjected to a freezing followed by a baking.
Should a watch need a service or repair, the stock room can provide spare bridges, wheels and dials that date back to 1885, tucked up in little pink-lined cardboard boxes.
The watches themselves look different and they all relate to the house’s design history. The best-selling Portuguese was not dreamt up by a designer in a black polo neck but was created in 1940 to satisfy the request of two Lisbon gentlemen.
The big and bold Pilot watches, known to collector’s as the Mark IX, date from 1936 when they were first produced for the British Army and are faithful to the original design with the high contrast big dial and fluorescent markings.
Jones’ plan to industrialise the production of pocket watches was not so hare-brained and he managed to produce 7,000 one year, though he went bankrupt eight years later becaue of a flaw in his plan. US duty made them uncompetitive.
