SJX Watches
In Depth: Louis Cottier’s Legacy
Sometime around 1949, in a workshop above a stationer’s shop in Carouge, Louis Cottier built a worldtime watch out of a piece of cardboard. Movado had asked him to fit their famous Ermeto — a small purse-watch that was wound by opening and closing its case — with a device to read the hour in any country. What Cottier delivered was a piece of card: two columns listing the 12 antipodal city pairs, with a sliding paper scale of hours. Open the case, slide the scale, read New York against Rome. It was ingenious to a fault. Movado’s verdict was blunt, and fair: it ignored the running of the watch entirely and “…could just as well be made on an address-book or a diary,” they wrote on February 4, 1950. The brand concluded that “Nobody would want to carry such a piece.” The 1949 World Time cardboard maquette proposed to Movado. Image – SJX composite/Musée d’art et d’histoire de Genève The cardboard maquette survives, in an archive of some 260 items — letters, patents, notebooks, photographs, a school exercise book, a golf-scoring mechanism — that comprise the most complete record we have of the man the watch world calls the father of the worldtimer. But the story revealed by this evidence is more nuanced than Cottier’s reputation suggests. The legend, briefly The received Louis Cottier is easy to summarise, because everyone summarises him the same way. He was born in Carouge in 1894, and trained in Geneva. After losing his job in the aftermath of th...
