IWC Schaffhausen

American watchmaker and engineer Florentine Ariosto Jones worked as a watchmaker in Boston. In 1868 he made the decision to produce high-quality watches for the American market in Switzerland.

The goal of fabricating at least 10,000 pocket watches a year and selling them to distant America proved unattainable.

The worldwide economic crisis triggered by the Vienna Stock Exchange and bankruptcy in 1873 did the rest, and in 1875 the first bankruptcy was upon us.

In 1879, the Schaffhausen-based machine manufacturer Johannes Rauschenbach-Vogel bought the International Watch Co for Sfr. 280'000.-. The economic breakthrough came in the following decades under his leadership and later under that of his son Johannes Rauschenbach-Schenk.

While market share was lost due to the quartz watch boom of the 1970s and 1980s, an economic success followed in the 1990s with a return to classic mechanical complications, the company being acquired by the German tachometer manufacturer VDO - Mannesmann in 1978, which in turn was hired by the LMH Group bundled.

Many well-known watch classics were created by the IWC, such as the aviator watches series Mark IX, X and XI or the Aquatimer, yacht club, engineer, Da Vinci etc just to name a few.