Fortis

Fortis was founded in 1912 in Grenchen, in the canton of Solothurn, by Walter Vogt, who that same year built the historic headquarters the company still operates from today. From as early as the 1920s the brand stood out for technical innovation: in 1926 it collaborated with British inventor John Harwood on the first mass-produced automatic wristwatch, and in 1929 a Fortis-Harwood accompanied journalist Lady Grace Drummond-Hay on the first round-the-world flight by airship, aboard the Zeppelin LZ 127 — an episode that fuelled founder Walter Vogt's passion for wrist instruments linked to flight. In 1938 came the Fortissimo series, among the brand's first water-resistant watches and the forerunner of what would, decades later, become the Marinemaster diving line.

In the 1960s and 1970s Fortis consolidated its instrument-watch vocation: in 1962 the Spacematic was born, designed for extreme conditions and presented to astronauts of NASA's Gemini program, while in 1967 the Flipper, with interchangeable coloured plastic cases, took the brand toward a younger audience and in some ways anticipated the modular spirit that Swatch would later embody. It was in these same years that the Spaceleader also appeared, a watch with a square design and a large date window that became an icon of the period's "space age" aesthetic, even without the direct link to space exploration that would later define the brand.

The decisive turning point came in 1994, when the Fortis Official Cosmonauts Chronograph became the watch officially issued to Russian cosmonauts before launch, after being subjected to rigorous tests of pressure, near-total vacuum and accelerations of up to 12 G: since then Fortis has been the historic supplier to the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, and its chronographs have flown on missions to the MIR station and the International Space Station.

After insolvency proceedings in 2017, the brand was acquired in 2018 by German entrepreneur Jupp Philipp, who repositioned the catalogue around the "Space, Sky and Sea" philosophy: the redesign of the Flieger line by designer Xavier Perrenoud, the relaunch of the Marinemaster diving line with COSC-certified movements, and, from 2023, the direct return of the brand's space heritage with the Novonaut, powered by the Werk 17 calibre and involved in projects such as the AMADEE-24 Mars analogue mission.