Florentine Ariosto Jones was twenty-seven, an American engineer trained in the Boston watch industry, when he sailed to Switzerland in 1868. He believed that Swiss watchmakers, the best in the world, could be combined with American mass-manufacturing methods to produce a watch that no European workshop and no American factory could match alone. He chose Schaffhausen — on the Rhine, in eastern Switzerland — because the river provided hydroelectric power and the cantonal government offered generous tax terms. Almost everyone else in the Swiss watch industry was, at the time, in Geneva or the Vallée de Joux. Jones went his own way.
The firm is, to this day, the only Swiss manufacture located on the Rhine. The original 1875 building still stands. The waterwheel that powered the early machinery is preserved in the lobby.
The pilot's watch
In 1936, IWC launched the Special Pilot's Watch — a large, antimagnetic, shock-resistant tool watch designed for the new Swiss aviation industry. The Pilot's Watch reference 431 of 1940 — a 55mm hand-wound observer's watch issued to Luftwaffe navigators, with an oversized onion crown operable while wearing gloves — would be reborn in 2002 as the modern Big Pilot 5002. Every IWC pilot's watch since then descends from that wartime instrument. The Big Pilot is, with the Royal Oak and the Submariner, one of the three or four most recognisable case shapes in twentieth-century horology.
In 1977, the engineer Kurt Klaus designed an in-house perpetual calendar of breathtaking elegance: a single crown adjusts every function, a four-digit year is displayed, and the entire mechanism is built from just eighty-one parts. Klaus's perpetual is, by widespread agreement, the most user-friendly perpetual calendar ever made.
"A complication is only beautiful when it is also useful. Otherwise it is just decoration." — Kurt Klaus
The four references that matter
- The Big Pilot 5002 (2002) — 46mm, the most uncompromising pilot's watch in modern production. Direct descendant of the wartime B-Uhr.
- The Portuguese ref. 325 (1939) — originally commissioned by two Portuguese dealers who wanted a wristwatch with the chronometric precision of a marine clock.
- The Da Vinci Perpetual (ref. 3750, 1985) — Kurt Klaus's masterpiece. Single-crown setting, four-digit year, programmed to the year 2499.
- The Mark XI (1948) — the British military's standard-issue pilot's watch from 1948 to 1981. Still wearable, still legible.
The house, today
IWC was acquired by Richemont in 2000. The brand has, under that ownership, expanded sharply — new boutiques, new ambassadors, a much larger marketing footprint. Some collectors have grumbled that the watches have grown bigger and louder. Others have noted, accurately, that the in-house movements have grown vastly more sophisticated, the materials harder, the case finishing better. The truth is somewhere in between. A well-chosen Mark XVIII, a current Portugieser 7-Day, a discontinued Big Pilot 5002 — these remain among the most honest expressions of mid-luxury Swiss watchmaking. Quiet, precise, masculine, unfashionable, undented by the passage of time.