Wittnauer

Wittnauer was born in New York from the business of Swiss-born Albert Wittnauer, who came to the United States as a young man to work in the Swiss watch import company of his brother-in-law Eugene Robert. In 1885 Albert started production under his own brand, formalised a few years later as the "A. Wittnauer Company": a brand born, therefore, not as an independent Swiss manufacture, but as a commercial bridge between Swiss watchmaking and the American market.

The link with Longines, for which Eugene Robert was already the exclusive sales agent in the United States, grew stronger over time until in 1936 it became the joint brand "Longines-Wittnauer", when ownership passed to the Hella Deltah Company. The two houses kept separate factories and movements, but shared the US distribution network for decades until, between 1994 and 1995, the Swatch Group (owner of Longines since 1983) took over direct distribution on the American market and the partnership ended: "Wittnauer International" was born as an independent brand.

In the same decades Wittnauer built a reputation for toughness and reliability: in 1918 it launched the AllProof, one of the first watches advertised as waterproof, shockproof and antimagnetic all at once, and in the 1960s it presented rugged chronographs such as the 242T, according to several industry sources among the (never officially confirmed) contenders in the NASA qualification tests later won by the Omega Speedmaster. After financial difficulties, in September 2001 Bulova bought the Wittnauer brand and assets for $11.6 million; since Citizen Watch Co. acquired Bulova in 2008, Wittnauer has been part of the Japanese group, which today offers it mainly as a line of dress watches and vintage-style reissues.