Iwc

IWC International Watch Co. AG, founded as the International Watch Company and trading as IWC Schaffhausen, is a Swiss luxury watch manufacturer located in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. Originally founded in Switzerland by American watchmaker Florentine Ariosto Jones in 1868, the company was transferred to the Rauschenbach family in 1880 after bankruptcy and has been a subsidiary of the Swiss Richemont Group since 2000. IWC is best known for its luxury pilot/aviation watches, material competence such as the pioneering use of ceramic and titanium in watchmaking, its chronographs, Gérald Genta’s design of the Ingenieur Ref. 1832, and Kurt Klaus’ user-friendly perpetual calendar.. In 2018, IWC was recognized by the WWF for its environmental efforts and received an "Ambitious" rating, placing first amongst fifteen other Swiss watchmakers. The luxury watch manufacturer won the Aiguille d’Or at the 2024 GPHG for the Portugieser Eternal Calendar, recognized as the overall best watch of the year for its groundbreaking secular perpetual calendar that accounts for Gregorian calendar exceptions, and its Double Moon™ display, accurate to one day in over 45 million years. In 1868, American engineer and watchmaker Florentine Ariosto Jones (1841–1916), who had been a director of E. Howard & Co. in Boston, founded the International Watch Company in Switzerland. He planned to assemble watches in Switzerland and import them into the United States. At the time, wages in Switzerland were relatively low and there was a ready supply of skilled watchmaking labor, mainly carried out by people in their homes. Jones encountered opposition to his plans in French-speaking Switzerland because he wanted to open a factory. In 1850, the town of Schaffhausen was in danger of being left behind in the Industrial Age. At this stage, watch manufacturer and industrialist Heinrich Moser built Schaffhausen's first hydroelectric plant and aided in further industrialization. Moser met Jones in Le Locle and