The house guides.

Hans Wilsdorf founded the company in London in 1905, registering the name Rolex three years later and moving the business to Geneva after the First World War. His conviction — unusual at the time — was that the wristwatch could be made as reliable as the pocket watch, and most of what Rolex is known for follows from trying to prove it.

Cartier was a Paris jeweller before it was a watchmaker, and it shows: the house thinks in shapes where the Swiss think in movements. That is not a criticism. Almost every non-round watch case in wide use today is a Cartier idea.

Louis Brandt began assembling watches in La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1848. The name the company now carries came from a movement: the Omega calibre of 1894, accurate and — more importantly — built from interchangeable parts, so it could be serviced by any competent watchmaker anywhere.

Antoine Norbert de Patek, a Polish émigré, began making watches in Geneva in 1839. The company took its lasting shape when the French watchmaker Adrien Philippe joined in 1845, bringing the keyless winding system that removed the need for a separate key — the reason you wind a watch by its crown today.

Jules Louis Audemars and Edward Auguste Piguet were two young watchmakers from the Vallée de Joux who went into business together in 1875. The company has never left the valley and has never left the founding families — the only one of the great complication houses that can say both.

Léon Breitling opened his workshop in Saint-Imier in 1884 and specialised immediately in timing things that moved — first for industry and science, later for aviation. The company's contributions are specific and consequential: the independent chronograph pusher in 1915, which separated starting the timer from winding the watch, and the second pusher in 1934 that gave the chronograph its modern reset.

Edouard Heuer founded the firm in 1860 and patented the oscillating pinion in 1887 — the mechanism that lets a chronograph start and stop without stopping the watch, still used in chronographs today. Heuer went on to time to a hundredth of a second in 1916, long before anyone needed to.

Hans Wilsdorf registered the Tudor name in 1926 and relaunched it properly in 1946 with a simple idea: a watch with the Rolex case, crown and bracelet, built around a reliable bought-in movement, sold for less. It was never meant to be a lesser Rolex so much as an honest one.

Ferdinand Adolph Lange founded his workshop in 1845 in Glashütte, a poor Saxon mining town he chose deliberately, and effectively created the German watch industry around it. By 1900 Lange pocket watches were among the most precise in the world.

Grand Seiko began in 1960 as an internal challenge: Seiko set out to build the best wristwatch in the world by Swiss standards, and wrote its own chronometer specification stricter than the Swiss one to measure itself against. By the late 1960s its watches were placing at the Geneva and Neuchâtel observatory trials, which the Swiss industry found unwelcome enough that the contests were restructured.

The International Watch Company was founded in 1868 by Florentine Ariosto Jones, an American watchmaker from Boston who wanted to combine Swiss hand skills with American machine production. He put the factory in Schaffhausen, in the German-speaking north, because the Rhine there could turn a water wheel — and because the established watchmaking valleys in the west wanted nothing to do with him.

Antoine LeCoultre set up a workshop in the Vallée de Joux in 1833 and spent the century solving problems nobody else had got to: a tool that measured a micron, in 1844, and a keyless winding system of his own. The firm's partnership with the Paris watchmaker Edmond Jaeger gave it the name it carries from 1937.

Kintaro Hattori was twenty-one when he opened a watch and clock shop in Tokyo in 1881. The factory followed in 1892, and Japan's first domestically made wristwatch, the Laurel, in 1913.

Jean-Marc Vacheron took on his first apprentice in Geneva in 1755, and the house has been making watches without interruption ever since — the longest unbroken run in the industry. The second name arrives in 1819, when François Constantin joined and wrote the line the company still quotes: do better if possible, and that is always possible.