The first "Elgin" calibres created by Vogel were well received by the market, and then from 1885 the unexpected success of watches with Josef Pallweber’s digital display system transformed the business and set it on a sound foundation. Rauschenbach junior was not a watchmaker but made the inspired choice of promoting the foreman of the escapement department Johann Vogel to technical manager. A second bankruptcy followed and the assets were taken over in 1880 by Rauschenbach, who died shortly after in March 1881 leaving the business to his wife, daughter and son Johann Rauschenbach-Schenk. Seeland secretly left Schaffenhausen with his family for America just before the stock take was carried out. This came to light during the summer of 1879 when a stock take was conducted by the managing director Johann Rauschenbach-Vogel and the factory foreman. Seeland generated apparent profits for IWC by overstating the value of stock on hand. Seeland recognised this and, using his experience as the London manger of Waltham's business in Britain, turned his attention to the large market that was Britain and her empire. The American market for watches was suffering from an economic recession that had begun in 1873, which together with an oversupply of mass produced watches from the big American watch factories, meant that the American market for watches was severely restricted. Seeland was a trained watchmaker and had been the Assistant Manager of the American Waltham Watch Co. Production resumed in the Autumn of 1876 when a new joint stock company was formed and Frederick F.
Jones returned to America and the remaining assets were auctioned off in 1876 In December 1875 the money finally ran out and the company was declared insolvent. Jones underestimated how much money would be needed and the enterprise ran into financial difficulty. To set up a new manufactory and make watches in the intended way everything had to be in place before a single watch could be sold, the buildings, machinery and staff, which required a large amount of capital. Jones imported machine tools from USA, or had them made in-house, and brought together Swiss craftsmanship with the standardised precision of machine tools to increase the accuracy of manufacture and thereby make parts that were interchangeable, which greatly simplified assembly and repair work. He received a poor reception in the French speaking traditional heart of the Swiss watchmaking industry, in the west part of Switzerland and was attracted to Schaffhausen, far to the north and east, by Henri Moser, a watch maker and watch merchant who had set up a dam across the Rhine in 1868 which provided plenty of power for Jones' proposed factory. Originally from Boston, Massachusetts, Jones was in Switzerland to try to establish a factory using American mass production techniques and Swiss labour, which was cheaper than American labour at the time, to make watches to be imported to America. The International Watch Company, or IWC, was set up in Schaffhausen in the German-speaking region of north-eastern Switzerland, in 1868 by the American engineer and watchmaker Florentine Ariosto Jones (1841-1916). Because of this connection it is sometimes wrongly assumed that all watches marked S&Co., or even SS&Co., were made by IWC, which is most definitely not true: see IWC and Stauffer for more on this. started to buy watches from IWC in addition to watches from other makers, all of which they had stamped with their trademark S&Co. 189190 Clamshell Waterproof Watchįrom 1894 the London company, Stauffer & Co.
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