Zero hour for IWC was in 1868, when Florentine A. Jones, an engineer from Boston, Massachusetts, founded the International Watch Co. in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. Jones, then just 27, was fascinated by the idea of uniting American expertise in automation with the legendary precision of the Swiss.

Enlightened innovation continued for the next several decades and perhaps culminated with the unveiling of the IWC Da Vinci in 1985. Just when the world had supposed that computerized watches were making mechanical watch movements obsolete, IWC introduced the world’s first automatic chronograph with perpetual calendar, year display and perpetual moon display mechanically programmed until the year 2499.

The dawn of the Da Vinci was also to become the renaissance of the complicated mechanical watch movement. Thanks to the genius of IWC designers and craftsmen, not only have mechanical timepieces regained their former dominance, but also for the first time a watch has been crafted to endure beyond time itself.