How Switzerland came to dominate watchmaking

In some respects, very little has changed at Cadrans Flückiger S.A., a dial maker founded here, in the French-speaking part of the Jura Mountains, in 1860.

The River Suze still trickles through the surrounding St.-Imier Valley, the smallest and least known of Switzerland’s three major watchmaking centers, behind Geneva and the legendary Vallée de Joux. The factory still uses original equipment, including an antiquated rose engine, to perform age-old techniques such as guillochage, a process that creates precise decorative patterns. And the workers still labor by hand to produce dials for a coterie of Switzerland’s leading watch brands, including Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet and Chopard.

Since being acquired by Patek Philippe in 2006, Cadrans Flückiger has grown from 54 employees to around 100. But it remains a throwback to the 19th century, when a system of production known as établissage — a French term referring to the assembly of a watch from components made by outside specialists — flourished throughout the watchmaking villages of the Jura.

Today, Swiss watches — particularly the handcrafted mechanical variety, lauded for their precision and pedigree — are synonymous with luxury. A Swiss airlines advertisement at Zurich Airport says it all: “Like shopping for a Swiss watch. Hard to make a mistake.”

“The Swiss have that image of producing quality at the highest level, as Germans have the image of producing the best cars in the world,” said Georges Kern, chief executive of the Swiss watchmaker IWC Schaffhausen. “And you cannot just copy this.”

Yet when the Flückiger dial factory opened, the Swiss were merely contenders jockeying for a leading position among Europe’s horologists. The tale of how they came to dominate the high-end watch trade offers a lens on to the industrial age, and the competing interests that have shaped the luxury business.

The Germans are generally regarded as the first people to make clocks small enough to be portable. Most historians credit Peter Henlein, a locksmith and clockmaker who lived in Nuremberg in the early 16th century, with making the first watch. His specialty was miniaturizing clocks so they could be worn as pendants or affixed to clothing.

Around the same time, Huguenots fleeing persecution in France brought their artistic savoir-faire to bear on the local watch trade in Geneva, gradually transforming the city into a cradle of high watchmaking.

But it would be nearly 300 years before the Swiss would challenge the supremacy of their European neighbors. The Germans and Dutch led the way in horological advances in the 17th century with inventions such as the fusee chain and balance spring, respectively. And no one disputes the 18th-century reign of the English, whose technical innovation — by men such as James Cox, George Graham and John Harrison — laid the groundwork for today’s mechanical movements.

By the time the Swiss-born master watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet — inventor of, among other things, the tourbillon, a rotating device to counteract the effects of gravity on a pocket watch; the pare-chute, a shock-absorbing mechanism; and the flat balance-spring with one or two terminal coils, known as the Breguet overcoil — arrived in Paris as a 15-year-old apprentice in 1762, the watch world was on the brink of another power shift.

BBC