Eberhard & Co.
Brand History
Eberhard & Co. was founded in 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds by Georges-Emile Eberhard, just twenty-two years old, in one of Switzerland's most important watchmaking districts. Within a few decades the manufacture grew into one of the area's most solid businesses: in 1906-1907 it moved into the building it would carry with it forever, a Beaux-Arts structure topped by a tower and an eagle sculpture, hence the nickname "Maison de l'Aigle" by which the house is still known today. On the founder's death in 1926, the company passed to his sons Georges and Maurice, who continued to lead it into the 1940s and beyond.
It is precisely between the late 1910s and the 1930s that Eberhard built its identity as a chronograph specialist: one of the first single-pusher wrist chronographs in watchmaking history already dates to 1919, followed in the 1930s by two-pusher mechanisms and increasingly refined split-seconds complications, which earned the brand a solid reputation among army officers, Italian ones in particular. In 1962 a family tragedy — a serious car accident involving Maurice Eberhard's daughter — prompted the family to sell the company; the sale concluded in 1972, when Charles Brandt took over its leadership. In 1978 the registered office moved to Biel, but the bond with La Chaux-de-Fonds was never fully severed.
In the new millennium the brand relaunched its identity with the Chrono 4 (2001), a chronograph with a patented dial featuring four aligned counters, and in 2018 it physically returned to the Maison de l'Aigle, where the following year it opened a small museum dedicated to its history. In 2019 it also presented the EB 140, the first chronograph movement fully developed in-house in the modern era: a milestone confirming Eberhard & Co.'s vocation to remain, today as in 1887, an independent Swiss watch manufacture.
