What could possibly be a more quaint and stable enterprise than setting up a watch business in a quiet little valley of the Ore Mountains in the 1800s? You would be right to assume that, as far as new ventures go, this would be on the less eventful side — and yet, you could not be further from the truth. 2025 marks 180 years of watchmaking in Glashütte, and with it 180 years of stunning, awe-inspiring, and unique watchmaking history. Come, follow us in discovering this outstanding company’s impressive legacy.
First, a few quick words about Glashütte Original today. Glashütte Original is a true luxury watchmaker that goes into a level of detail both in terms of design and manufacturing that few of its contemporaries even aspire to. Its current watch collections include unrivaled staples like the Senator Chronometer with its special zero-reset and minute detent system, the Sixties and Seventies lines that hark back to the company’s vivid past, the Pano collection with its special, beautifully legible, single-plane Panorama date display, and the SeaQ with its own approach to blending outstanding performance and timeless beauty.
Today, you can discover Glashütte Original’s singular dedication and attention to detail by the company performing tasks few others do themselves, including the individual heat-bluing of its screws, the hand-engraving of its balance bridges, and even operating its proprietary dial production facility, just next door to the manufacture, also in Glashütte. The list of amazing feats and features goes on and on — but this is not a manufacture visit article, so let us get back to where and how things started.
“180 years ago, a grand vision began on a small scale,” reminisces Glashütte Original. In 1845, with the establishment of his company in Glashütte, Ferdinand Adolph Lange was the first watch manufacturer in the world to introduce the metric system. Until then, watchmakers in continental Europe typically used the Paris line, which corresponded to approximately 2.26 millimetres — in fact, even to this day, watch and watch movement manufacturers often share the diameter in lines or “lignes.”
Although it may rightfully sound unbelievable to us, watchmakers in fact relied on division not by ten but by twelve, which in turn created inaccuracies and inconsistencies that have held back components and thus entire movements from greatness. Fun fact, the metric system became mandatory in Germany only some three decades after Glashütte had already been using it — proof that watchmaking has always been a high-tech enterprise, on the cutting edge of what we humans can aspire for and achieve. A desire for utmost precision drove him and the little valley’s watchmakers to develop and use a micrometer, and to continuously refine their machining and measuring tools, all in pursuit of greater performance and narrower tolerance ranges.
Just about a century later, the watch manufacture founded by Ferdinand Adolph Lange became part of VEB Glashütter Uhrenbetriebe. Today, Glashütter Uhrenbetrieb GmbH, or Glashütte Original, is the official legal successor to the former state-owned enterprise, and it continues to pursue its vision of maximum precision to this day, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves too much.
For centuries, the greater region of Glashütte, some 30 kilometers (20 miles, or a three-day journey) away from Dresden, primarily lived from mining the Ore Mountains, later supplemented by straw plaiting, of all things, an occupation that relied heavily on dexterity and attention to detail — some strong parallels with watchmaking, you see? Sadly, as ore deposits dwindled or became too difficult to get to, the local population feared for their livelihood.
The Kingdom of Saxony had to think hard to give the region a new perspective, which it did, deliberately choosing watchmaking as the field of expertise that would help revive the local economy. Although the government did not provide funding for the construction of factories, it did assist with the training of watchmakers, thus laying the foundation for an industry that would come to focus on specialised expertise and its transfer from the outset. Transfer that expertise it did, as Glashütte is a treasure chest of incredible watchmaking know-how, from movement development to the production and decoration of components all the way to their assembly, fine-tuning, and testing. But again, we are getting ahead of ourselves.
In just a few years — speaking of the 1870s — Glashütte managed to rise from a once-thriving mining town to an internationally recognized player in the manufacturing of high-precision watches. This was not the work of a single individual or even of a single company but rather a joint effort by great visionaries who supported each other and maintained close friendships. Their greatest legacy? The German Watchmaking School Glashütte.
On May 1, 1878, the first 16 students began their studies on watchmaking in two rooms of the Glashütte community school building. A little town almost overflowing with watch manufactures was still a long way to go — but the momentum was building up. In 1881, a dedicated school building opened with room for 60-80 students, fast-tracking the development of Glashütte as a serious watch producer. Forty years later, in 1921, the building was extended further still, and received its own park and a “monumental fountain,” too!
To become ‘Graduate of the German Watchmaking School Glashütte’ became a major honor and a widely recognized title, and so you can only imagine what it meant to be asked to teach and lecture at the School.
As befits the best universities and schools, that of Glashütte also fostered innovation, laser-focused on making ever better timekeepers, of course. In the early 20th century, Alfred Helwig, master watchmaker and teacher at the School, took up the challenge of further developing one of the most elaborate complications in the art of watchmaking: the tourbillon. He succeeded in 1920 by securing the tourbillon assembly not from both sides but only one, thus freeing it from the upper bridge that blocked the view and added thickness. His students assisted him in building the first movements, and the so-called Flying Tourbillon went on to become one of Glashütte’s most famous inventions.
Well beyond the skunkworks of the School, Glashütte’s obsession with accuracy was all over the air — literally. Every Saturday, the school building became the venue for a special ritual. You see, from 8:00 a.m. to 8:10 a.m., the Berlin observatory transmitted a time signal to Glashütte via one of the first Morse Code lines in the Ore Mountains. With the help of a so-called coincidence clock, the time could be checked to the nearest tenth of a second. Alfred Helwig reminisced: “This taking of the time signal was an almost ceremonial act, accompanied by the greatest silence in the whole building, so that the coincidence of the beats could be heard very clearly. The headmaster and teacher were present, and each time a few students were called in so that they could all gradually familiarise themselves with the time signal reception.”
Why dedicate such attention to a time signal? The best watchmakers are obsessed with accuracy, as they should be, and so they require and indeed fabricate and maintain a so-called reference clock. They use this clock as a point of reference against which they compare the performance of the movements and watches that they are crafting. In watchmaking terms, regulation is the act of fine-tuning a movement to the best it can be. It has to be done individually to every single high-quality watch since the various components responsible for accuracy differ ever-so-slightly due to the way they are machined, the alloys they are made from, and even the way they are assembled and lubricated.
No two movement are the same, and the regulators of watch manufactures perform what is often referred to as the “art of regulation” in recognition of their minor differences. It takes immense dedication and a wealth of expertise to be able to poise a movement’s regulating organ in a way that manages to extract peak performance from it. The proud watchmakers of Glashütte have long been recognized for their commitment to excellence — as exemplified by the School’s ritual that happened every Saturday.
Pushing the boundaries remained a Glashütte-trait throughout the many chapters of its history — so much so that the region’s watch industry almost folded under the pressure of this pursuit. In the early 1900s, although Glashütte had already been famous for the performance and beauty of its pocket watches, a new dimension would soon reveal itself to them: that of the wristwatch. Its watchmakers were hit hard by sky-high inflation and a slump in exports as a result of the First World War, compounded by the global economic crisis at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s. Still, what ultimately threatened to be their undoing was a decisive market development that Glashütte almost missed out on.
Up until then, wristwatches were produced either as “wristlets” (i.e. wristwatches were considered to be some sort of jewelry worn exclusively by women) and in marginal numbers for use by the military or perhaps on scientific expeditions. The shift was nevertheless inevitable and by 1930 the number of wristwatches sold in Germany equalled that of pocket watches for the first time. By 1934, the share of wristwatches had risen to 65 percent, as market analyses from this period show.
Functioning in deep-rooted respect for their craft and products, Glashütte largely dismissed this development as a short-lived fashion trend and wristwatches were met with scepticism. Understandably so: The accuracy and reliability of wristwatch movements in widespread use at the time did not come close to the standards with which the Glashütte companies had been manufacturing pocket watches. Alas, this reasoning did not stand the test of time and, ultimately, some failed in consequence of their own standards — the Deutsche Präzisions-Uhren-Fabrik Glashütte (German Precision Watch Factory Glashütte), Germany’s largest production co-operative at the time, for example, filed for bankruptcy in 1926. More broadly speaking, it was only a matter of time before Glashütte watchmakers’ reluctancy to adapt to the latest and greatest would fire back.
As it tends to happen, two sister companies were soon founded from the insolvency assets, pursuing a grand vision from the outset. UROFA (Uhren Rohwerke Fabrik AG) and UFAG (Uhrenfabrik AG Glashütte) were the first companies in Glashütte to concentrate their efforts on the production of wristwatches. Their appointed Managing Director, Dr. Ernst Kurtz, was fully aware of the competition’s enormous advantage. Trying to lead the ambitious project to success, he realised that he had to reinvent watch production in Glashütte altogether. Aside from modernising all company structures, Dr. Ernst Kurtz attached great importance to training the next generation of employees, even demanding every apprentice to learn a musical instrument during their apprenticeship — which most of them did with joy and enthusiasm.
To enter the world of wristwatches, Glashütte needed a venerable and competitive movement, something it achieved with Calibre 58. Calibre 58 marked a breakthrough for the company in two respects. When developing the movement, the designers prioritised a large mainspring barrel and a large balance wheel — the former supplying torque throughout an extended power reserve, the latter providing solid timekeeping. A proven principle from the construction of pocket watches, which UROFA transferred to a miniaturised format. They even created an indirect drive for the seconds hand, allowing for a yet-more-compact movement architecture.
Far from being “just” a watchmaker’s watchmaker, Dr. Ernst Kurtz displayed a stroke of genius with the marketing of the Calibre 58 under the name “Raumnutzwerk”. The large-scale campaign emphasised the clever design of the compact movement measuring 20 by 28 millimetres with a height of 4 millimetres and equated its performance with that of pocket watches. The strategy hit the nerve of the times and made Calibre 58 a sales success. UFAG assembled some of these movements into finished watches and usually marked the dials with a G for Glashütte.
At the beginning of the Second World War, UROFA was entrusted with the development of a chronograph that was to be specially adapted to the requirements of pilots. These timekeepers were so robust and high-performant that they received a special name: Based on the Latin word “tutus”, which means safe or protected, UFAG marked these watches with the label “Tutima.”
In Glashütte, the Second World War ended on 8 May 1945 with a bombing raid by the Soviet air force. As a result, the watch industry in the partially destroyed town was devastated. The employees of the watchmaking companies salvaged what they could, while senior employees hid finished watches in their homes to save them from the lootings of the Red Army. Their worst fears came true when the Soviet occupying power ordered the dismantling of the Glashütte watch industry in August 1945.
“They took everything… all the machines, every screwdriver, every blueprint, every drawing, the workbenches, simply everything,” remembers a contemporary witness and former employee of UROFA – the largest watch manufacturer in Glashütte at the time. Machines and tools as well as the company’s remaining production stocks were packed into wooden crates and transported away using 32 lorries, each with a payload of 10 tonnes.
The people in Glashütte were left with nothing. 300 tons of watchmaking passion, invention, and work — gone. On their own initiative, they began to craft the equipment they needed to resume work. It turned out to be a stroke of luck that the Soviets had left behind the moulds of some of the machines when they confiscated them. Thanks to these, a nearby iron foundry was able to manufacture complicated equipment such as lathes and milling machines from scratch. Some other equipment was rebuilt by the Glashütte toolmakers entirely from memory. Fuelled by a strong sense of community, the companies also agreed to lend each other urgently needed machines.
Only a few months after the end of the war, small numbers of watches could again be assembled, for which remaining stocks of components still existed. Five months after Germany’s capitulation, with the direction of Helmut Keller, one of UROFA’s leading engineers, a new movement dubbed Calibre 61 was developed. An ingenious piece of work that was nevertheless extremely difficult to produce in worthwhile quantities owing to widespread shortages.
In 1950, the newly founded German Democratic Republic (GDR) presented its first five-year plan, which dictated the distribution of resources and production targets throughout its entire economic area. Private companies were intentionally placed at a severe disadvantage compared to state-owned enterprises. It was for these valid concerns about a blatant shortage of supplies and the threat of labour being recalled that UROFA and UFAG applied to be transferred to state ownership.
Their merger gave rise to VEB Glashütter Uhrenbetriebe (GUB), which would hold a monopoly position as the only watch manufacturer in Glashütte for the next four decades.
The range of products that VEB Glashütter Uhrenbetriebe was able to offer during this time fell outside the norm in several respects: Between 1951 and 1991, the company developed four new movements with automatic winding. Calibre 74, which became the heart of the Spezimatic presented in 1964, was a resounding success. With a diameter of 28 mm and a height of 5.05 mm, it was in line with the international trend towards watches with a slimmer case size. To this day, the Spezimatic is considered the most successful watch ever produced in Glashütte. It came in dozens of different colours and – even more unusual for the socialist GDR – was available witg a solid gold case. Its biggest value today lies, however, in the emotional connections that many owners associate with their watch. At the time, the Spezimatic used to be a popular gift for special occasions and sometimes even served as a replacement for a pair of wedding rings. It is because of these stories and experiences that the Spezimatic is remembered by an entire generation – and cherished by the next one.
1978 saw the birth of the Spezichron that came in a so-called TV-shape case, an iconic fan-favorite that today lives on in Glashütte Original’s aptly named Seventies collection — although, naturally, with incomparably superior execution, presentation, and refinement.
In light of the GDR’s struggles with supplied components, machines, and overall economic performance, VEB Glashütter Uhrenbetriebe developed its own “Abteilung Sondermaschinenbau” or Special Machine Construction Department which endowed it with an increased manufacturing depth that lives on to this day. In other words, watchmaking in Glashütte managed to become ever more independent and self-reliant.
In the course of German reunification, VEB Glashütter Uhrenbetriebe was entered in the commercial register as Glashütter Uhrenbetrieb GmbH on 16 October 1990. Following its privatisation in 1994, the company has been using the brand name Glashütte Original as a clear commitment to its roots and as a statement of its special historical position. It went on to continue the great watchmaking tradition of its home town under the brand name Glashütte Original, thus sending a clear signal of continuity: the brand not only draws its self-perception from the heyday of watchmaking in the 19th century, but also proudly acknowledges its watchmaking heritage from the 20th century, which was characterised by major crises and cutbacks.
Today, Glashütte Original proudly carries this 180-year legacy shaped by ingenious inventors, humble students, resourceful craftspeople, and a town that, above all else, maintains a near-two-century desire to build the finest watches in the world.
If you wish to wear the latest piece of Glashütte history on your wrist today, and do so in the most noble and luxurious fashion, then the new PanoMaticLunar Anniversary Edition is what you are after. Crafted from what is widely regarded as the most splendid of all precious metals, every one of the 180 limited edition pieces are clad in solid platinum. Its deep sheen and special hue, combined with unrivaled heft, make this Glashütte Original icon fittingly special for such a notable anniversary. A glistening dial in blue aventurine comes to life at every little flick of the wrist, and so does the hand-finished and hand-engraved in-house Calibre 92-14, thanks to its self-winding system — hence the “Matic” in PanoMaticLunar.
More information can be found on the official Glashütte Original Website.
For more inspiration, go to our Timepieces section.
Last Updated on October 16, 2025 by Editorial Team
