IWC Schaffhausen

About IWC Schaffhausen

IWC was founded by an American watchmaker, Florentine Ariosto Jones, who put a Swiss factory on the Rhine at Schaffhausen to combine Swiss craft with American machine production. Its identity is engineering-first: oversized pilot's watches with soft-iron cages against magnetism, and the Portugieser, born in the 1930s when two Portuguese merchants asked for a wristwatch as accurate as a marine chronometer.

Signature models

The references that define the house — and the ones you are most likely to meet.

• Big Pilot
• Portugieser Chronograph
• Mark XX
• Ingenieur
• Aquatimer
• Portofino

What to look for

Details worth checking before you trust a dial. None of them certify authenticity on their own.

• A soft-iron inner case on Mark-series and Ingenieur models — it makes the watch noticeably heavier than the case size suggests
• The Big Pilot's oversized conical crown, designed to be gripped with gloves on
• Pellaton winding system on in-house 5000-series calibers — an automatic that winds in both directions via pawls, not a conventional reverser
• Applied Arabic numerals with a railway-track minute chapter on Portugieser dials

Facts

• The Mark 11 was issued to RAF navigators from 1948 and stayed in service for over thirty years.
• IWC's Portugieser exists because a wristwatch large enough to house a pocket-watch movement was, in the 1930s, considered absurd.