Horological Meandering

Junghans focused museums, the one in the manufacture proper and the Uhren und Automuseum, with the collection of Martin Sauter. 

While I have yet to visit the Terassenbau museum here a short pictorial overview of the Sauter collection. 

Nowadays the vast majority of discussion on German watch landscape and history focuses on Saxony and revolves around Glashütte. At the same time in earlier times the Black Forest was a possibly similarly important German watch industry center. The cuckoo clocks we all know and love l? Definitely Black Forest and not Saxony (or Switzerland) 😁

As the major clock manufacturers suffered heavily from both the quartz crisis as well as from the overall market for clocks declining overall, and also the watch manufacturers from the area - even the ones surviving the quartz era with interesting innovation - later on went through several insolvencies and did not influence the rewriting of the historical canon in the same way. 

The museum is a five story affair, with four floors of vintage cars and finally (and fittingly) the top, fifth floor devoted to watches. 



As most such museums you have a combination of models, historical drawings, period marketing materials and the watches themselves being displayed. 

The one that continues to exert the largest pull on yours truly is the Junghans Mega 1. This was a watch that as a very young child I listed after and one I would still like to add to my collection at some point. When launched in 1990 it was a technological tour de force. While this was the era of Japanese domination in terms of quartz design and functionality improvements and the Swiss were taking the first steps towards a Veblenian transformation, the Mega 1 brought a radio controlled time setting (with practically perfect accuracy as a result), world time and a cool - even if challenging- feature of placing the antenna in the strap (I would not be able to swap those freely 😉🤷🏻‍♂️). This was fairly Star Wars back in the day 🛸

Of course both the watches and history of the brand are so much more than this one seminal moment 😊

For some reason at least one watch was displayed upside down 😂

Max Bill - possibly the best known watch of the brand 🙌🏻

The Chronograph - also the basis for the post-WW2 Herman Airforce watch prior to the 1550 era. 

First automatic ⏱️

Alarm… (for JML? 😁)

Transistor-steered ATO clock…

Workplace from back in the day ⌨️

And many more clocks and watches…

Obviously the Junghans brand is deeply embedded in the town…

And the overall architecture of the town is a sight itself - in case whoever is accompanying you has less interest in watches. 

Hope you enjoyed this little museum presentation - if you want to look at a part of the watch industry history nowadays less commonly known about, it’s not that far from Stuttgart and I can highly recommend a look. 

And if there is interest, I can put up some pictures of the cars and motorcycles in the museum, too 😊👍🏻

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