Quote:
Originally Posted by ScottSinger
Believe Lange completely folded during or after WWII due to Russian occupation ( located in East Germany )
Resurrected again in 1990's by Lange offspring and others.
Sometimes they refer to JLC, Breguet and some other as oldest continuous manufacturers but not Lange.
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None of them is. Gallet is the oldest continuous watch manufacture in the world. It's history dates to the 1400s. It is still owned by Gallet family members. I put some effort into finding out just "what's what" re: the Gallet assertion of tracing its lineage to the 1400s. (
http://forums.watchuseek.com/f2/what...ml#post8469717)
One can find the basic timeline of Gallet's history on Gallet's website or on Wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallet_%26_Co.#Time_line . Understanding the role of guilds, business organizational structures, and so on will require more digging, but it will allow one to put together the whole picture. Or one can get the "Cliff Notes" version by reading the WUS post linked above. (not short, but shorter by far than doing the "digging" to put it all together oneself)
Aside:
Learning of the details of Gallet's history was like a trip through Renaissance history. It put a very human perspective on a lot of the stuff about which one read in school, particularly the story of the Huguenots and the Protestant Reformation. If you happen to watch the TV series
Reign, the story line that deals with the Protestants in France is literally the same story from history that drive the watchmaking industry into Switzerland, and specifically to the mountains outside of Geneva.
Another thing I observed in the course of digging into Gallet's history is that one must very closely/critically read the marketing hoopla that one encounters re: "oldest company," "oldest continuous brand," etc. The discussion here --
http://forums.watchuseek.com/f2/what...ml#post8460795 -- makes clear what is well understood by any businessperson: a brand and a company may be synonymous, but are not necessarily so. Whether the distinction is relevant depends on the context of the discussion at hand.
All the best.