Timex, officially Timex Group USA, Inc. (formerly known as Timex Corporation) is an American global watch brand and manufacturing company founded in 1854 as the Waterbury Clock Company in Waterbury, Connecticut. In 2008, the company was acquired by Timex Group B.V. and was renamed Timex Group USA. However, Timex Group USA is the original company that the holding company is named after.
Originally specializing in affordable clocks, the company gained a reputation for applying mass-production techniques to timekeeping devices, making reliable products accessible to a wider public at a time when clocks and watches were often considered luxury items. In doing so, they become one of the most well known brands in America during the late 20th century. The brand primarily competed with Casio and Seiko in the early digital watch market, pioneering in both LED and LCD watches with their SSQ (Solid State Quartz) digital watch line and with their Indiglo backlight system.
History
Waterbury Clock Company (1854–1944) Brass manufacturer Benedict & Burnham created Waterbury Clock Company in 1854 to manufacture clocks using brass wheels and gears. Waterbury Clock Company was legally incorporated on March 27, 1857, as an independent business with $60,000 in capital. The American clock industry was producing millions of clocks with scores of companies located in Connecticut's Naugatuck River Valley, earning the region the nickname "Switzerland of America". The Waterbury Clock Company was one of the largest producers for both domestic sales and export, primarily to Europe.
Ingersoll Watch Company
The company originally produced clocks as less expensive alternatives to the high-end European counterparts of the time. In 1887, they introduced the large Jumbo pocket watch, invented by Archibald Bannatyne and named after the famous P. T. Barnum elephant. The Jumbo was put on the market in New York City on a trial basis, catching the attention of Robert H. Ingersoll, a salesman and eventual marketing pioneer. During the turn of the century, Waterbury Clock Company produced millions of pocket watches for the Robert H. Ingersoll & Bro. watch company, in which Robert partnered with his brother Charles. In 1896, Ingersoll introduced the Ingersoll Yankee, a dollar pocket watch supplied by Waterbury Clock Company. These watches gained such great popularity that they became known as "the watch that made the dollar famous."
Waterbury Watch Company In 1877, a new prototype was introduced to Benedict and Burnham for an inexpensive pocket watch made of 58 parts, mostly punched sheet brass. They immediately set aside an unused portion of their machine shop and began producing the Long Wind at a rate of 200 per day by 1878. The department quickly outgrew its space in the plant, so Benedict & Burnham incorporated Waterbury Clock's sister company Waterbury Watch Company in 1880 with a capital of $400,000 to manufacture and sell inexpensive watches and other timepieces. Waterbury Watch started out very successfully in its early days, employing hundreds of women for their "slender fingers" and "delicate manipulation", and it became the largest-volume producer of watches in the world by 1888.
Waterbury Watch quickly fell into bankruptcy, however, due to poor sales techniques where "jobbers" and salesmen gave away much of the product as loss leaders with little regard to the company's future, thereby cheapening the products' perceived value. In a last attempt to salvage the company, Waterbury Watch began to produce higher-end watch models which only created more demand on a workforce unable to keep up with the complexity of the new watches using several hundred parts. The company was finally reorganized as the New England Watch Company in 1898, as its London sales office was placed into liquidation. The company continued to focus on high-priced watch models and eventually fell into receivership, discontinuing business in July 1912. Robert H. Ingersoll & Bro. bought the Waterbury plant and began manufacturing Ingersoll Watches there in 1914.
Advent of the wristwatch World War I brought new demands for timepiece design; artillery gunners, for example, needed an easy way to calculate and read time while still being able to work the guns. The Waterbury Clock Company met this need by modifying their small Ingersoll ladies' Midget pocket watch. They added lugs for a canvas strap, repositioned the crown to 3 o'clock, and made the hands and numbers luminescent for nighttime readability, thus producing one of the first wristwatches.
In 1922, Waterbury Clock Company purchased the Robert H. Ingersoll & Bro. company for $1.5 million. The firm had gone bankrupt the previous year due to the post-war recession. However, Waterbury Clock was unable to deliver on Ingersoll's guarantee of quality in Europe due to the Great Depression, so they sold the London-based Ingersoll, Ltd. to its board of directors in 1930, making it a wholly British-owned enterprise. The Ingersoll brand name was continued in the United States by Waterbury Clock into the 1950s, while Ingersoll Ltd. produced the Ingersoll watch brand independently for the European and other markets.
Waterbury Clock Company regained its identity in the consumer market after the Great Depression and a period of hardship. They reached a license agreement with Walt Disney in 1930 to produce the famous Mickey Mouse watches and clocks under the Ingersoll brand name. They introduced the Mickey Mouse timepieces to the public at the Chicago World's Fair in June 1933, and they quickly became the company's first million-dollar line, saving it from financial disaster.
Thomas Olsen was the owner of Fred. Olsen Shipping Co., and he fled Norway in 1940 together with Joakim Lehmkuhl and their families because of the Nazi invasion. They eventually came to the United States seeking investments to assist in the war effort. Olsen and Lehmkuhl purchased controlling interest in Waterbury Clock Company in 1941, and Olsen became chairman. Olson appointed Lehmkuhl president, who had studied business and engineering at Harvard and MIT, and the company became the largest producer of fuse timers for precision defense products in the United States under his direction. They built a new concrete plant in nearby Middlebury, Connecticut in 88 days in 1942 for the high-volume production of precision timers. In August 1943, the Under-Secretary of War awarded the Waterbury Clock Company the Army-Navy "E" Award for excellence for their "Anglo-American fuse", and shareholders voted the following December to rename the company United States Time Corporation.
United States Time Corporation (1944–1969) Sales declined after the Korean War in the 1950s because of diminishing defense orders, and United States Time president Lehmkuhl was convinced that an inexpensive watch would be a market success if it was both accurate and durable. He felt that low cost could be accomplished through the combination of automation, the precision tooling techniques used in making fuse timers, and a simpler design than that of higher-priced Swiss watches. Durability was accomplished through a new hard alloy called Armalloy, developed through wartime research. Armalloy was used to produce longwearing bearings, replacing the expensive jewels traditionally used in a watch's movement. These innovations led to the debut of the Timex brand in 1950, though the name was first used on a small trial shipment of nurses' watches in 1945.
US Time Corporation bought Lacher & Co. AG in Pforzheim, Germany (the Laco brand), on February 1, 1959, in order to acquire the electric watch technology which that company had developed. They also purchased the DUROWE (Deutsche Uhrenrohwerke) brand. Timex sold Durowe to the Swiss movement manufacturer ETA SA on September 1, 1965.
Slogan: World's largest manufacturer of watches and mechanical time fuses
The company manufactured mechanical components for missiles during the boom of American missile development in the late 1950s, including fuses, gyroscope, accelerometers, guidance sub-system, and various other miniature precision items.In Control—with U.S. Time Gyros. // Missiles and Rockets, July 1957, v. 2, no. 7, p. 119. The company promoted its products under the claim of being the "world's largest manufacturer of watches and mechanical time fuses."U.S. Time Gyros in Control. // Missiles and Rockets, March 1957, v. 2, no. 3, p. 23.
The company also produced ammunition components, and repaired, installed, and reactivated government-owned production equipment. The height of the company's ordnance and ammunition business lasted through the Vietnam era in the 1960s and 1970s, during which it operated Joliet Army Ammunition PlantDefense procurement. // Defense Industry Bulletin, April 1966, v. 2, no. 4, p. 26. as well as privately owned plants and storage facilities.Defense procurement. // Defense Industry Bulletin, June 1966, v. 2, no. 6, p. 26.
Slogan: It takes a licking and keeps on ticking John Cameron Swayze was widely viewed as the most credible newsman in the United States, so Lehmkuhl decided to hire him as a company spokesman for live "torture tests" on television using Russ Alben's slogan "Timex – Takes a Licking and keeps on Ticking". Hirshon Garfield developed these commercials as elaborations on tests suggested by United States Time Corporation salesmen. The commercials included high-divers, water skiers, a dolphin, dishwashers, jackhammers, paint mixers, and the propeller of an outboard motor, each torturing a Timex watch.
Consumer demand increased for the watches, despite resistance from jewelers because of the low 50% markup, and Timex opened new distribution channels including department stores, cigar stands, drug stores, and other mass-market outlets. By 1962, the Timex brand held the number one market share position in the United States, where one out of every three watches sold was a Timex. Foreign markets were added with company sales offices in Canada, Mexico, France, Great Britain, Germany, and Portugal, as well as distributors in about 20 other countries. Plants were built in the United States, Europe, and Asia.
Edwin H. Land, co-founder of Polaroid Corporation, contacted United States Time Corporation in 1948 in search of a manufacturer for his cameras. A strong relationship was forged between the companies in 1950 resulting in United States Time becoming the exclusive manufacturer of all Polaroid cameras worldwide through the 1970s, totaling more than 44 million cameras. United States Time Corporation was renamed Timex Corporation on July 1, 1969.
Timex Corporation (1969–2008)