Back in the 1850s, Swiss watchmaking was genuinely a cottage industry; company owners would visit Swiss farming families in their homes at the end of summer, deliver to them raw watch parts, and, over the winter they would finish them and return them to the owner at the end of the winter. The owner would then have the parts assembled into watches and the farmers would take their cows back up the mountain now that the snow was gone.
America changed all this the exotically named Aaron Lufkin Dennison saw how rifles were mass-produced using identical machine-made parts; he realised that watches could be made similarly. Soon, America was overtaking Switzerland in watch production and also undercutting them in price; then, two unrelated events changed everything. The Swiss sent a delegation to the US to discover how the Americans were able to outproduce them, and a renegade watchmaker who had worked with Dennison and knew everything about the production system went to Switzerland. The delegation produced a report saying that the Swiss industry had to change, and the American Florentine Aristo Jones was on hand to teach them how to do it.
However, what Jones didn’t teach the Swiss was the incredible costs involved in setting up a factory before it could produce a single watch. Dennison’s operation had gone bankrupt three or four times before becoming very profitable, and the same fate awaited Jones. He went broke, and the factory was bought by a local businessman, Johannes Raussenbach. After his death, the firm was run by his son (also named Johannes), who ran it for 20 years. Unfortunately, he had no sons, so the business was now run by the husbands of his two daughters. One of the husbands was the famed psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, and this was how the father of analytical psychology became a director of IWC. It was this directorship which funded almost all of Jung’s research over the years.
As you might expect from the family name of the owners, the Raussenbachs and the location of the factory, Schaffhausen, IWC is in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, and almost completely surrounded by Germany, it is separated from Germany by the River Rhine. Its proximity to Germany came at a cost in April 1944, when USAAF bombers miscalculated their aiming point and bombed the IWC factory instead of their intended target across the border. Speaking of WW2, IWC was one of the very few Swiss watch firms that provided watches to both Germany and Britain during the conflict; let’s call that Swiss neutrality.