Where the First Automatic Wristwatch Was Really Made | Fortis Manufacture Visit + CEO Interview

It has been exactly 100 years of the automatic movement. Now last year five million mechanical movements left Switzerland and the majority of those will have been automatic and they can all trace their routes to the room directly behind me. So let's go inside and discover how that's happened. The watch on your wrist right now can probably trace its routes back to the room that I am stood in. Here in Grenchen, Switzerland, this is where the first serially produced automatic wristwatch was ever made. So today we are talking the 100 year anniversary of the automatic watch. We're going to be talking about John Harwood, the British watchmaker that invented it, Walter Voigt, the founder of Fortis, where we're stood right now, Anton Schimd, the guy who made the movement possible, and all these other characters that came together to make automatic wristwatches a viable and profitable business all the way back in 1926. So come with me, follow along as we find out how this was made possible and what it led to today. So what makes this tiny 100 year old watch so special? Well, this was the first automatic wristwatch. Yes, other people had tried to make automatic pocket watches back in the late 1700s, but this was the first time it had been realized in a wristwatch. Now you might notice on first glance there's no crown here and that's exactly what Harwood wanted. That crown was where dust, dirt, and anything else could get into a watch and stop it from working. He wanted to get rid of it entirely and he found a partner that wanted the same thing in Walter Voigt. So the watch is wound by an automatic rotor in the back. They used a bumper system compared to today's 360 rotor. Theirs only rotates 270 degrees going between two sprung bumpers inside the movement. And then how do you set the time if there's no crown? They had an ingenious bezel rotating system that allowed you to set that time through the rotating of the bezel. Of course, these are still very small watches. This is still the 1920s we're talking about here. Watches aren't getting big at this point. So all of these mechanics are smashed down into this tiny, tiny case. John Harwood, coming from Bolton to the Isle of Man and now to Switzerland, was trying to find a way to industrialize this new technology. He'd patented it back in 1924 and just two years later, with the help of Walter Voigt and the Fortis partner, which was the Anton Schind movement manufacturer, they were able to get the first one out the door on the 13th of July 1926. Pretty much exactly 100 years ago. Now that's a pretty incredible turnaround. That's why I'm here at Fortis and that's why now we're going to go and talk to the Fortis CEO to find out how that collaboration took place and what impact it's having today. We're here. Your Philip. Thank you so much for having us in. What a delight. We're here at the Fortis bar. Yes. Great place for staff parties, I can imagine. Definitely. Love it. Now we're here, we're talking John Harwood. 100 years of the automatic movement, an incredible achievement, but something that Fortis was there day one, ground zero. In fact, two floors down from where we're sat right now. Tell us about that meeting of Fortis, Harwoods, Britain, Switzerland. How does that come together? Where does that happen? It was John Harwood who got in contact with Fortis to Mr. Voigt because at the end he was just an inventor. He has only the plans, he has the technical drawings, but he was not able to realize his idea. To me, that's what's so amazing about this story, about John Harwood is he's coming in as this outsider and he's got no connections really to the industry when he starts off. Being able to make that connection with someone like Voigt, the fact that he's able just to come in, be so open and open up the factory downstairs to him and say, yes, we'll make this brand new movement that no one's ever tried to do. Yes, because he solved the problem. The main idea of Mr. Harwood was just to make the watch more robust, make it more resistant. That's why he said, okay, if the dirt is coming through the crown, we have to remove the crown. If we do not have a crown, it have to wind up itself. How can we solve this problem? This was the main idea. There was a third party involved in that, right? There was the Anton Schind SA. Yes. All the watch brands in these times, they did not produce their movements by themselves. They all bought basic movements and then they start working on these kind of movements. Schild was one of these big producers, as most people know, I think. If you think about it, the last time the evolution came from powering a watch was Breguet with keyless winding and then followed by Harwood. Then the next step really is Rolex. We can't have this conversation about Harwood, about automatic winding, without talking about Rolex. 100%. Yes, they come along in the 30s and they introduced that full winding rotor. It was not a 360 degrees rotor on the Harwood. It was just a pendulum. Yes. Rolex was the company who introduced the 360 degrees rotor. But they also introduced, I would say to the industry, the most powerful form of marketing that we've ever seen. 100%. And that marketing came back to bite them in the ass a little bit when they said they invented the automatic movement. Yeah, but that's wrong. Sorry about that. Yeah, they did get it wrong. They did get it wrong. But, and this is the only time I've ever seen them do this, they corrected themselves. Yes, they apologized. Mid 50s. But they come out full page ads in the Sunday Express in the UK and they name John Harwood. Yes. A pretty astonishing feat. But there was a legal case before that as well to make that happen? I think so. To be honest, I really don't know. But when you read this article, it sounds a little bit like there have been a court case before. Yeah, guns to their heads. Yeah, it's fantastic. I mean, the way that all comes through is, like, what a fantastic story. But this bumper rotor in here starts it off. That's the beginning of all automatic movements. And now the entire industry is awash with automatic movements. You guys assembling automatic movements in the same room, downstairs, you've got the solitas, you've got your kinesi movements down there. Do you still feel that connection when you're in that room of back to Harwood and back to... I took over in 2018 and we started refurbishing this room in 2019. And this was the main idea. You have to keep this feeling of an old historic watchmaking building. And so this connection here, it's real for Fortis, but it's not something that you guys cling on to. You're not trying to recreate this watch today? No, no, no. This is not the idea behind the brand Fortis. This is our history. This is where we are coming from. But it's still the same idea. Make the watch more resistant. If there's something we can do, making the watch more robust, more resistant against any conditions, we will do that. And I think this is maybe the main idea. And of course, we will keep automatic because we will not do hand-wound or quads or what else. People, a lot of times they ask me, do you have quads watches? Do you have hand-wound? No, we are the inventor or the producer of the first automatic wristwatch. No, we don't do quads. That's fantastic. I mean, it would be wrong to. It would be. And as you say, you're staying true to the ideals, but you're not trying to recreate the Harwood watch. To be honest, I think it's a little bit boring. All these watch brands just bring back all these old vintage watches. Yeah, I know there's a trend for vintage, but it's just a trend. We should produce watches for the next 20, 30 years. They should be wearable also in 30 years and not just follow a trend. And that's more my personal vision behind. Love it. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. For a story about a watch that is powered by movement, there are a lot of moving parts here. Yes, we have John Harwood. Yes, we have the team at Fortis. But they were not the only ones that were trying to make an automatic watch a reality at this time. The brand that is now El Leroy, they were doing the same thing at the same time, but it was Fortis and Harwood that really came through and perfected that bumper rotor, which then was developed by Rolex into the fully automatic movement that we know and love today. So we have to consider, yeah, there's a lot of mystery here. There are a lot of unanswered questions, but we don't have all the records. They weren't kept at the time. We have what we have to go off. The watches have survived better than the story. And in a way, that is what is romantic about this. We have the watches in hand. We can see the technology and we can tell how it has developed from 1926 to today in 2026. But as always, I want to hear from you guys. What do you think of this story? What do you think of how it has developed from Harwood making that first innovation in 1923 to coming over here, finding a production partner, and then finally getting it out the door. And then for all of a sudden, the movement to disappear and Rolex to suddenly take over and be the dominant force in this story. Let me know down in the comments. I will be in there. I'll be reading them. I'll be replying. I can't wait to see down there. And as always, do not forget, like the video, subscribe to Time and Tide's YouTube channel to never miss another video just like this one.