Timeline / The first Swiss wristwatch
The first Swiss wristwatch
A gold, enamel and diamond bracelet watch made by Patek Philippe in Geneva in 1868: the earliest Swiss wristwatch on record.
- The need
- None of a technical kind. It was jewellery: a small watch a woman could wear on the arm and consult without reaching for a pocket watch.
- Made for
- Not a known commission. The firm made it in 1868 and its ledgers record the sale eight years later, on 13 November 1876, to Countess Koscowicz of Hungary.
- What was new
- A Geneva manufacture selling a watch built into a bracelet, rather than a one-off made to royal order.
- Worth knowing
- It is small and it is wound with a key, not a crown: a six-ligne movement, no. 27368, with a cylinder escapement, in a rectangular gold case whose hinged cover, set with diamonds and enamel, closes over the dial. For the next thirty years the bracelet watch stayed a women’s accessory.
- Where it is now
- On display in the Patek Philippe Museum in Geneva.
Historian’s noteThe claim is the first Swiss wristwatch, and the word matters. Breguet made a bracelet watch for Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples, ordered in June 1810; it is older by more than half a century, but it has been lost since the 1850s.
SourcesPatek Philippe · Patek Philippe Museum
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