1. The company hasn’t always been called Eterna
It wasn’t until thirty years after the company was established that Eterna was adopted as the brand name we know today. Previously, the maison was named after its founders, physician Josef Girard and teacher Urs Schild. It wasn’t until around 1890, when one of their collections, Eterna, became a runaway success, that the two founders decided to ditch the patronym in favour of the more commercial name.
2. Eterna laid the foundations for the industrialisation of watchmaking
These days it’s the done thing to vaunt the human qualities of small-scale workshops. At the turn of the 20th century, however, quality was equated with progress and modernity. Electricity had not yet reached the verdant slopes of Grenchen, but steam certainly had. Girard and Schild were among the first manufacturers to introduce steam-powered automation. Electrical machines were brought in in the 1940s.
3. And then Eterna vanished once again
By 1960 Eterna had a significant presence on the international markets, and a new strategy was in order. At the time, all companies of consequence had a name whose length reflected the breadth of their international ambitions. And thus Eterna-Werke, Gebrüder Schild & Co. was born.
4. It was one of the first companies in the world to develop a wristwatch
Good ideas have a life of their own, and often pop up, just a few years apart, in different companies, inspired by different thinkers in the same milieu. This is true of the wristwatch, which a number of different companies claim as their own invention. Nevertheless, in 1904 Eterna was one of the first watchmakers to develop the concept, and it even registered a patent, which constitutes legal proof of precedence even if others claim to have come first.
5. Alarming developments
Another patent that was to prove hugely influential, and is still in great demand today, is the alarm. Eterna registered its patent for an alarm watch just after the wristwatch patent, and its first alarm watch went on sale in 1914.
6. Ladies first
Eterna followed the fashion for women’s watch collections that took off between the world wars, setting a number of records in the process. In 1930 a range of women’s watches espousing the aesthetic canons of the time included the narrowest baguette watch ever produced commercially. It measured just 7.25 x 22.5 mm.
7. Delirious Eterna
Very few people have heard of Maurice Grimm, a watch designer from Saint-Blaise in Neuchâtel, now the headquarters of Louis Moinet. His domain of predilection was the ultra-thin watch, one of the undeniable advantages of quartz movements. In 1979 he set himself the challenge of designing the world’s slimmest movement. The project was code-named Delirium. Why? Because Delirium Tremens sounds very similar to “très mince”, which means “very slim” in French. But because the pun only works in the Gallic tongue, ETA, which bought the movement, shortened the name to “Delirium”. As ETA was owned by Eterna, the parent company made the most of this exceptional development to produce the Linea Museum quartz watch, the thinnest ever made, measuring just 0.98 mm from front to back.
