In 1839, Antoine Norbert de Patek and François Czapek established a watchmaking partnership in Geneva. Seven years later, Patek dissolved the partnership and entered a new agreement with the Alsatian watchmaker Adrien Philippe, whose invention of the keyless winding mechanism would become the company’s first...
In 1990, a year after reunification gave East German craftsmen access to a Western market they had been separated from for 40 years, a young entrepreneur named Roland Schwertner registered a watch company in a small Saxon town. Nomos Glashütte was founded with neither the...