IWC Watches

In the year 1868, an American engineer and watchmaker named Florentine Ariosto Jones who was the director of F.Howard & Cie travelled 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. Jones 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 likely near this time that Jones met the watch manufacturer and industrialist named Johann Heinrich Moser who manufactured pocket watches for the Russian Czars. Moser was an industrial innovator and had just recently finished designing a hydro station in Schaffhausen powered by water from the Rhine. Moser showed a personal 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. based in Schaffhausen.