Omega

Omega was named after a movement. The company had been making watches for nearly half a century when, in 1894, it introduced the pocket-watch mechanism whose name eventually replaced the founder's on the business.

Louis Brandt had opened his workshop in La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1848. He assembled watches from components supplied by local makers. After his death, his sons Louis-Paul and César moved the business to Bienne and expanded factory production. The Omega movement was part of that change. Its components could be made and replaced consistently, an important difference from work that depended on fitting each piece individually. In 1903, Omega became part of the company's name.

In 1932, one Omega watchmaker travelled to the Los Angeles Olympic Games with thirty stopwatches for the officials. The company's work in sports timing later extended far beyond watches, into electronic equipment able to separate finishes too close for an observer to judge unaided.

Mechanical watchmaking continued alongside that work. In 1999, Omega put the English watchmaker George Daniels's Co-Axial escapement into production. An escapement releases a wound spring's energy in controlled increments and keeps the watch's regulating balance moving. Daniels had developed a different way of transferring that energy, reducing sliding friction at the contact points. Making his design suitable for a production wristwatch was a separate undertaking from proving it in a handmade one.

Daniels also bought unfinished Omega movements for watches bearing his own name. One of those watches is now in the Clockmakers' Museum: an Omega-made mechanism with a case, dial and hands made in Daniels's workshop. The industrial collaboration produced objects under both names.