Timex

The Waterbury Clock Company was founded in 1854 in Waterbury, Connecticut and produced clocks and pocket watches for the American market. In 1881 the company introduced the $1 pocket watch, an affordable timepiece that made precision time accessible to American workers for the first time. By the 1930s, the company had relocated to Middlebury, was producing Mickey Mouse character watches under license from Walt Disney, and supplied Ingersoll brand watches across the US.

After WWII, the company pivoted entirely to wristwatches and introduced the iconic Timex advertising era of the 1950s and 1960s. Host John Cameron Swayze ran a series of televised torture tests: Timex watches were strapped to boat propellers, fired from cannons, attached to jackhammers, and dropped into industrial mixers, all surviving to tell the time. The campaign's slogan "It takes a licking and keeps on ticking" became one of the most famous advertising lines in American history. In 1969 the company formally adopted the Timex name, reflecting its consumer brand identity.

The 1992 Indiglo electroluminescent backlight was a Timex invention and a landmark consumer innovation: press a crown and the entire dial lights up with a uniform blue-green glow, replacing tritium and lume for general-purpose legibility in darkness. In the 2017-2021 period under design director Giorgio Galli, Timex launched the Q Timex reissue (a 1979-design homage that sells out every drop) and the Marlin reissue (a 1960s American dress watch) at sub-$200 prices, building a new generation of collector interest in the accessible end of the watch market.