Patek Philippe Walked Away From a 120-Year-Old Standard and Wrote a Stricter One. Here's What That Actually Automates.
On May 1, 1839, a Polish cavalry officer living in exile named Antoine Norbert de Patek joined forces with a watchmaker named François Czapek to found Patek, Czapek & Cie in Geneva.¹ ² Patek had fled Poland after a failed uprising against Russian rule; Czapek left the partnership six years later over disagreements, and in 1845 Patek met a French watchmaker named Adrien Philippe, the inventor of the keyless winding and setting mechanism that would replace the key-wound pocket watch.² ³ By 1851 the firm carried the name it carries today, Patek Philippe & Cie.² In 1932, in the middle of the Great Depression, two brothers named Charles and Jean Stern, who ran a dial-making business that supplied the company, bought Patek Philippe outright, and it has stayed in Stern family hands for four generations since, the last independent, family-owned watch manufacture left in Geneva.⁴ ⁵ Today it makes roughly 70,000 watches a year, every movement and case built, finished, and assembled in its own workshops.⁶ ⁷
