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Hanhart 1882 GmbH

Hanhart is founded

The sun glows red in the evening sky over the little town of Diessenhofen, located on the River Rhine in northeast Switzerland, as the watchmaker Johann A. Hanhart sits down, takes out a pen and paper and drafts an announcement. He “respectfully informs the worthy residents of Diessenhofen and surroundings” that he has purchased a business and its premises at the town’s Hauptstrasse with the intention of opening a watch shop.

The world’s first reasonably priced mechanical stopwatch

The sport-loving Willy Hanhart introduced the world’s first reasonably priced mechanical stopwatch in 1924. He had participated in a track and field sports meeting in the previous year, for which the organizers had great difficulty in finding even four stopwatches of varying quality. These timepieces came exclusively from Switzerland at that time and were only available at exorbitant prices – if at all – since essentially only individual watches were produced to order. The young man became so irritated by this that he decided to manufacture stopwatches himself. In association with a watchmaker, he conceived and designed the first reasonably priced mechanical stopwatch – and in doing so he pressed the start button for the company that leads the stopwatch sector to this day.

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