The Revue Thommen Story: 170 Years of Swiss Watchmaking You've Probably Never Heard

Vaiana Express | August 2026 | 11 min read

Revue Thommen is a Swiss watchmaker founded in 1853 that spent much of the 20th century building precision instruments for military and commercial aircraft, survived a full bankruptcy in 2000, and is still family-run today. If you've never heard of it, that's not an accident — it's a brand that spent 170 years quietly building instruments other people trusted their lives to, rather than spending on marketing.

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Why This Brand's Story Matters Before You Buy

It's a fair question to ask about any watch brand you haven't heard of: is this a real Swiss watchmaker, or a name attached to generic parts? With Revue Thommen, the answer is easy to check — the brand has a documented 170-year paper trail, including supplying flight instruments to an actual air force, a watch reportedly worn by U.S. presidents, and a family that's run the company across five generations. That's a very different story than a brand invented for e-commerce.

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1853: Founded in a Swiss Valley Town

The company traces back to 1853, when a watchmaking operation was founded in Waldenburg, Switzerland — a small valley town along the Basel–Geneva route. In 1859, Gédéon Thommen and Louis Tschopp acquired and restructured the company. Thommen was also the founder of the Waldenburgerbahn, a steam railway connecting the valley's villages — the same industrial spirit that shaped the watch business.

Early products were exactly what you'd expect from a mid-1800s Swiss workshop: wristwatches and pocket watches, built using the company's own in-house movements rather than outsourced parts — a level of vertical control that wasn't universal even among Swiss makers at the time.

The Revue trademark itself was registered in 1910, and by 1960 the company had settled on the name most collectors know today: Revue Thommen.

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From Wristwatches to Aircraft Instruments

Here's the part of the story that sets Revue Thommen apart from almost every other Swiss watch brand: starting in the 1930s, the company began building precision instruments for aviation — a business line that would come to define much of its 20th-century identity.

In 1916, Revue Thommen built the first aircraft chronograph for the Swiss Air Force, laying the groundwork for decades of military instrument work. From 1936 to 1943, the company held a formal development and production contract to supply cockpit instrumentation to the Swiss Air Force — including altimeters, airspeed indicators, vertical speed indicators, clocks, and even landing gear components for the Swiss EKW C-35 military biplane.

By 1945, that aviation expertise moved into the civilian and sporting world too, with the launch of a pocket altimeter built for mountain climbers — later adapted into altimeters used by parachutists.

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The Cricket: A Watch Worn in the White House

One of Revue Thommen's most famous products wasn't a dive watch or a pilot's chronograph — it was a mechanical alarm watch called the Cricket, named for the distinctive chirping sound of its mechanical alarm mechanism. The Revue Thommen Cricket became well known internationally, and is reported to have been worn by multiple U.S. presidents during the mid-20th century.

At a time when a wristwatch with a genuinely audible, reliable mechanical alarm was a real feat of miniaturized engineering — not a smartwatch feature, but a fully mechanical complication — the Cricket became one of the brand's signature achievements, and a point of real pride for the company to this day.

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The Quartz Crisis, Bankruptcy, and a 2001 Rebirth

Revue Thommen's story isn't one of uninterrupted success — and that's part of what makes it credible rather than a marketing fairy tale. Like most of the Swiss watch industry, the company was hit hard by the quartz crisis of the 1970s and 80s, when cheap, accurate quartz movements from Japan devastated traditional mechanical watchmakers worldwide.

In 1987, "Thommens Uhrenfabrik AG" launched the unified "Revue Thommen" brand specifically to create clearer international market positioning. The following decades brought further strain: the company became increasingly dependent on Asian markets through the 1980s and 90s, and was hit hard again by financial pressure at the end of that decade. In 1999, Revue shuttered its La Chaux-de-Fonds production facility, consolidating operations back to Waldenburg as a cost-saving move.

It wasn't enough. By July 2000, the company was bankrupt.

In 2001, Grovana Uhrenfabrik AG acquired the rights to Revue Thommen's watchmaking business, taking over production and worldwide distribution — and, critically, choosing to revive the brand rather than let a 148-year-old name disappear.

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Today: Still a Family Business

Andreas Thommen — a descendant of founder Gédéon Thommen — later took over operational leadership of the brand alongside partners, forming GT Thommen Watch AG. That makes Revue Thommen a genuine multi-generation family watchmaking operation, a rarity even within Swiss horology, where many historic names have long since been absorbed into large conglomerate groups with no remaining family involvement at all.

The brand today continues to build on both halves of its heritage: mechanically robust Swiss-made watches for collectors, alongside continued instrument work drawing on nearly a century of aviation engineering experience.

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What This History Actually Means for a Buyer

None of this history matters if it doesn't translate into something real on your wrist — so here's the direct connection:

• Genuine Swiss movements, not just a "Swiss Made" sticker. A company with over a century of in-house movement experience has an engineering culture that outsourced-movement brands simply don't.
• A design philosophy built around reliability under real conditions, inherited directly from decades of building instruments where failure wasn't an option — cockpits, mountainsides, and dive conditions.
• A smaller, dedicated dealer network rather than mass retail distribution, which is part of why Revue Thommen offers significantly more watch-for-the-dollar than mainstream luxury names with bigger marketing budgets.
• A brand that's already proven it can survive hardship — bankruptcy and revival is a stress test most watch brands never face, and Revue Thommen came out the other side still making watches to the same standard.

If you're deciding between a well-known brand you're paying a premium for and Revue Thommen's comparable specs at a lower price, that 170-year track record — aviation contracts, presidential wrists, and a real family business that survived its own bankruptcy — is the kind of substance that's hard to manufacture with marketing alone. See our full comparison guide for how the current dive lineup stacks up on price and specs.

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Frequently Asked Questions

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