Timex's long history is studded with more innovative,
best-selling timepieces than any other watch company in the world.
Here follows an outline of our history. For more information, you
may purchase the handsomely illustrated coffee table book "Timex:
A Company and its Community 1854-1998", available through our
on-line catalog in the Collector's Corner section.
In late 2000, Timexpo Museum opened in Waterbury Connecticut,
offering a fun experience for the whole family.
Timex: 150 Years of Innovation and Leadership
| 1850s-1870s: 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." |
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1880s: Waterbury Watch, a sister company,
manufactured the first inexpensive mechanical pocket watch in
1880 and quickly sold more than any other firm in the world.
The "Waterbury," known for its extraordinarily long,
nine-foot mainspring, was assembled by a predominantly female
workforce whose dexterous fingers were prized for the close and
exacting work. Waterbury pocket watches sold throughout North
America and Europe, and could be found in Africa, where they
were presented as gifts to native chieftains, and as far away
as Japan. |
| 1900s: 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. |
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1917: During World War I, the U.S. Army required
Waterbury Clock to re-tool the Yankee pocket watch into a convenient
new "wristwatch" for soldiers; after the war, returning
veterans continued to wear the handy timepiece, and civilians
took them up in huge numbers during the 1920s. |
| 1930s: 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. |
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1940s: 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 anti-aircraft fuses than any other Allied source.
1950s: 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.
By the end of the 1950s, one out of every three watches bought
in the U.S. was a Timex.
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1960s: 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.
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| 1970s: By the mid-1970s, the renamed Timex
Corporation had sold more than 500 million of these mechanical
movements. At this time, every other watch bought in the U.S.
was a Timex, and the brand retailed in two hundred and fifty
thousand different outlets. None of these manufacturing, sales,
and distribution records has ever been duplicated by another
watch manufacturer. |
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1980s: Alone among all domestic watchmakers,
only Timex survived the brutal 1970s watch industry shakeout
caused by new digital watch technology and fierce price competition
from the Far East. Having gradually phased out mechanical watch
production in favor of digital watches, in 1986 Timex introduced
its "Ironman Triathlon®," jointly devised by serious
athletes and industrial designers. Within a year, the "Ironman
Triathlon®" became America's best-selling watch and,
diversifying into a full line for men and women, became the world's
largest selling sports watch, a distinction it has held throughout
the 1990s. |
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1990s and Beyond: 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 in 1992, when
the blue-green Indiglo® night light 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®.
The All-Day Indiglo® display, using a hologram-like material,
provides greater contrast between digital numbers and the display
background. In 1994, Timex introduced the Data Link® watch,
a sophisticated wrist instrument that carries scheduling, phone
numbers, and other personal information, having collaborated
with Microsoft to create the necessary software to communicate
the data from computer to watch. In 1998, Timex pioneered its
i-Control™ turn n pull analog alarm watch and, in a joint
venture with Motorola, a new wrist pager called Beepwear®. |
Timex embraces the year 2003 with high brand confidence and a strong
global workforce. Annual surveys consistently rank Timex among the
leaders of fifty fashion brands in jewelry and accessories and
the third most popular of all women's accessory brands. Seventy-five
hundred employees are located on four continents: in Middlebury (next
door to Waterbury), Connecticut; Little Rock, Arkansas; Manaus, Brazil;
Besancon, France; Pforzheim, Germany; Cebu, the Philippines; People's
Republic of China; Jerusalem, Israel; and Delhi, India.
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