A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIMEX: 154 YEARS AND STILL TICKING

1850’s-1870’s
Waterbury Clock made timekeeping affordable for working class Americans. Its inexpensive yet reliable shelf and mantel clocks, with cases designed to imitate expensive imported models, contained simple, mass-produced stamped brass movements. Waterbury Clock’s products grew out of a long tradition of innovative clockmaking that developed in Connecticut’s Naugatuck Valley, known during the nineteenth century as the “Switzerland of America.”

1900’s
By the turn of the twentieth century, the watch industry’s first and most successful mass marketer, Robert H. Ingersoll, worked with Waterbury Clock to distribute the company’s “Yankee” pocket watch, the first to cost just one dollar. Twenty years later, with nearly forty million sold, the “Yankee” became the world’s largest seller and “the watch that made the dollar famous.” Everyone carried the Yankee: from Mark Twain to miners, from farmers to factory workers, from office clerks to sales clerks.

1930’s
The popularity of a brand new cartoon character led Waterbury Clock to produce the very first Mickey Mouse clocks and watches in 1933, under an exclusive license from Walt Disney. Despite the deep shadow cast by the Great Depression, within just a few years, parents bought two million Mickey Mouse watches for their children. Originally priced at $1.50, these same watches are collector’s items that today command higher and higher prices.

1940’s
During World War II, the newly renamed U.S. Time Company completely converted its factories to wartime manufacturing. Over the course of the war, it turned an eighty-four year tradition of reliable mechanical timekeeping to the record-breaking production of more high-quality mechanically-timed artillery and antiaircraft fuses than any other Allied source.

1950’s
U.S. Time’s wartime expertise in research and development and advanced mass production techniques led to the creation of the world’s first inexpensive yet utterly reliable mechanical watch movement. The new wristwatch, called the Timex, debuted in 1950. Print advertisements featured the new watch strapped to Mickey Mantle’s bat, frozen in an ice cube tray, spun for seven days in a vacuum cleaner, taped to a giant lobster’s claw, or wrapped around a turtle in a tank. Despite these and other extensive live torture tests, the Timex kept ticking. When John Cameron Swayze, the most authoritative newsman of his time, began extolling the Timex watch in live “torture test” commercials of the late 1950s, sales took off. Taped to the propeller of an outboard motor, tumbling over the Grand Coulee Dam, or held fist first by a diver leaping eighty-seven feet from the Acapulco cliffs, the plucky watch that “takes a licking and keeps on ticking” quickly caught the American imagination. Viewers by the thousands wrote in with their suggestions for future torture tests, like the Air Force sergeant who offered to crash a plane while wearing a Timex watch. By the end of the 1950s, one out of every three watches bought in the U.S. was a Timex brand watch.

1960’s
The Timex brand name became a household word during the 1960s. Having completely conquered the low-priced market, the company upgraded and diversified its product line. It introduced the “Cavatina,” its first women’s brand in 1959 and with it, a revolutionary merchandising concept: the watch as an impulse item. For the price of one expensive watch, women could buy several Timex watches to match different occasions or ensembles. Technological advances allowed the company to offer a wide range of products, including the first low-priced electric watches for men and women, as well as several other, inexpensive jeweled models. Still another improved watch movement, introduced in 1961, served as the cornerstone for an extraordinary array of men’s wristwatches.

1990’s
In the 1990s, a nearly 150 year-old Timex vigorously pursues its long tradition of technological innovation and market leadership. The company introduced the industry’s first electroluminescent watch face in1992, when the blue-green “Indiglo®” night light feature appeared on some of its digital and analog watches. Today, more than 75 percent of all Timex® watches are equipped with the “Indiglo” night light. All-Day Indiglo®, a hologram-like material, provides greater contrast between digital numbers and the display background. In 1994, Timex introduced the “Data Link®,” system a sophisticated wrist instrument that carries scheduling, phone numbers, and other personal information, having collaborated with Microsoft to create the necessary software. In 1998, Timex pioneered its “Turn and Pull” analog alarm watch and, in a joint venture with Motorola, the new “Beepwear®” wrist pager.