In 1868, the American engineer and watchmaker, Florentine Ariosto Jones was director of F.Howard & Cie. In Boston, the America leading watchmaking company. He travelled across the Atlantic to Switzerland, where his plan was to found the International Watch Company with the aim to manufacture movements and watch parts for the American market. However he had failed to take into account that the workers in the Geneva region and the remote valleys of the Jura mountains feared for their jobs and were against Jones’ intrusion.

It was probably around this point that Jones met watch manufacturer and industrialist Johann Heinrich Moser who manufactured pocket watches for the Russian tsars. Moser was an industrial pioneer and had recently finished building a hydrostation in Schaffhausen powered by water from the Rhine. Moser showed a great interest in Jones’ plans and so the foundations were set for the first and only watch manufacturers in north-eastern Switzerland: the IWC INTERNATIONAL WATCH CO. in Schaffhausen.

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