Ode to the past
For its jubilee year, IWC Schaffhausen breathes new life into some of its classic icons
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LIKE ANY ELDERLY PERSON who cherishes old keepsakes, IWC Schaffhausen is celebrating its 150th birthday next year by resurrecting a pocket watch it created in 1886. The original Savonnette Pocket Watch Pallweber was a pocket watch, but its brand new reincarnation is in the form of a wristwatch; and as befits the times, it is also IWC's first digital timepiece.
It features jumping numerals that were first developed by an Austrian watchmaker named Josef Pallweber. They show time as a sequence of numbers. When full minutes and hours are reached, the numbers move up by one unit. Only the seconds are shown with a hand.
A total of 20,000 of the jumping hours and minutes pocket watch left the IWC factory. But production was discontinued in 1890 because, according to IWC, the Pallweber pocket watch was "a commercial success for only a limited period of time".
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