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Timex Corporation is the best-known American watch manufacturer, famous for half a century for durable low-cost timepieces. Timex' headquarters are located in Middlebury, Connecticut.
The company began in 1854 as Waterbury Clock in Connecticut's Naugatuck Valley, known during the nineteenth century as the "Switzerland of America." Sister company Waterbury Watch manufactured the first inexpensive mechanical pocket watch in 1880. During World War I, Waterbury began making wristwatches, which had only just become popular, and in 1933 it made history by creating the first Mickey Mouse clock under license from Walt Disney, with Mickey's hands pointing the time.
During World War II Waterbury renamed itself U.S. Time Company. In 1950 the company introduced a wristwatch called the Timex. Over the next three decades, Timex was sold through a series of advertisements which emphasised its durability by putting the watch through "torture tests," such as falling over the Grand Coulee Dam or being strapped to the propeller of an outboard motor, with the slogan "It takes a licking but it keeps on ticking." The company later renamed itself Timex Corporation, and eventually sold more than 500 million watches.
In the 1970s, the American watch and clock industry was devastated by the arrival of cheap and reliable mechanical watches from the Far East, as well as the development of digital watches pioneered by Japanese companies. In the 1980s, in a joint venture with British Sinclair Research, the company entered the home computer business, selling such computers as the Timex Sinclair 1000 and succeeding machines, modeled on the ZX81 and ZX Spectrum. After a reasonably good sales performance to begin with, Timex didn't cope with the low-end market's eventual saturation and so the company withdrew with major losses.
Timex survived its bad times of the 70s and 80s and remains in business, although it is no longer a dominant player in the industry. As of 2002, it had 5,500 employees on four continents.
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