Travels In Time

With its mix of familial and geopolitical upheaval, entrepreneurialism, determination and innovation, the story of H Moser & Cie is a rare delight, writes Christian Barker

- Christian Barker

Physical traits such as red hair, blue eyes and cleft chins, or an aptitude for maths or fondness for drink, often skip a generation, but the love of watchmaking seems to have lain dormant not for a generation, but for almost a century in the family behind H Moser & Cie.

In 1826, 21-year-old Heinrich Moser, the heir to a long line of Swiss watchmakers, had just completed his training in horology, but his youth and relative inexperience meant the conservative burghers of his hometown, Schaff hausen, refused to allow him to open a workshop or maintain the town’s clocks, as previous generations of Mosers had done. So, with a head full of dreams and (we imagine) a mouthful of curses, the ambitious young watchmaker set off to make his fortune abroad. Consequently, in 1828, H Moser & Cie was founded in the imperial Russian city of St Petersburg.

By the 1840s, the Moser name had become synonymous with fine watches (it was even cited in Dostoevsky’s writing), and the company had swiftly become a market leader with branches in the major Russian cities and more than 50 employees catering to clients that included the imperial court and Peter Carl Fabergé (Moser movements powered his ornate table clocks). Moser also established a supplementary factory in the Swiss cantonment of Le Locle in the 1830s, and in 1853 he decided the time was ripe to make a triumphant return to Schaffhausen—a decision probably driven in part by a desire to show the naysayers of his youth what this “unproven” watchmaker was able to build from nothing abroad.