#ebosa — Public Fediverse posts

The Accidentally-Great Launch of the Vulcain Cricket

The Vulcain Cricket wasn’t the first alarm wristwatch, but it was the first one to find a market. And what a market it found! Launched exclusively in the United States in late 1947, it became the first “it watch”, finding a place on the wrists of presidents and “Mad Men” in the go-go 1950s and kicking off a genuine craze for alarm watches. But Vulcain was not known for great marketing. Was this just a case of having the right product at the right moment?

The Quest for the Alarm Wristwatch

The first alarm wristwatch was the Eterna Cal. 68, introduced in May of 1914. It failed to find a market and vanished into obscurity. And the rise of radium paint eliminated the nascent repeating watch market at that time, too. It seemed that no one wanted or needed an alarm watch. The biggest issue is that the wrist tends to silence the alarm, rendering the complication useless.

As is so often the case, the failure of one product shows the need for another.

By 1925, André Didisheim and his cousins Robert and Maurice Ditisheim were taking charge at Ditisheim et Cie, Fabriques Vulcain et Volta, the La Chaux-de-Fonds watchmaking firm founded by their grandfather in 1858. André was one of the most-interesting people I have encountered in my research: He played professional football in Spain, and traveled the world as heir to Vulcain, Marvin, and (through his wife), Movado!1 A frequent visitor to the booming city of Buenos Aires, Didisheim was meeting with local importer Juan Peire around 1937 when a surprising request came in: Could Vulcain build an alarm wristwatch?

Robert Ditisheim was the inventor of the Vulcain Cricket. His grandfather founded the company in 1858.

André Didisheim knew just who to ask: His cousin Robert Ditisheim was a genius watchmaker and inventor, serving as technical director to the family firm. He had recently developed an ultra-thin watch movement for K. Hattori & Co. of Japan, which imported precision movements produced by the Ditisheim factory. Then he added a chronograph module, enabling Vulcain to produce a column-wheel timer on the market (albeit with no counters).

Robert Ditisheim took up the alarm watch concept with gusto, remembering the alarm and repeating pocket watches and clocks produced by his father under the Vulcain and Volta brand names. On April 20, 1943, while the Allies were pressing Italy and Germany out of North Africa, Ditisheim et Cie filed a patent for a pusher that could control the winding, setting, and silencing of an alarm watch. On September 27, at the height of the Allied invasion of Italy, Ditisheim et Cie filed a patent for a watch case with a mesh back. But Robert Ditisheim was not satisfied that the ring could be heart while the watch was worn on the wrist, spending two more years on this vexing problem.

Nobel Prize-winning French Physicist Paul Langevin was arrested by the Gestapo and held under house arrest in Troyes west of Paris by the Vichy government. Fearing for his safety, the French Resistance secretly moved him to Switzerland, arriving in Porrentry on May 2, 1944. An illegal refugee, Langevin lived quietly under an assumed name until returning to France in September.

Paul Langevin played a special part in the history of the Vulcain Cricket. During this summer in the Swiss Jura2, Langevin met André Didisheim, perhaps visiting the Vulcain office in La Chaux-de-Fonds. When he heard of Robert’s challenges making the alarm heard while the watch was worn on the wrist, the physicist happily advised to “think of the cricket: so small, yet it sings so loudly!” This was no mere quip: Paul Langevin was the world’s leading authority on acoustics, and knew exactly how insects use “stridulation” to vibrate a tense membrane called a tymbal, serving as a natural amplifier.

Robert Ditisheim was inspired. On July 28, 1944, he filed for a Swiss patent for an alarm case with just such an inner membrane, leaving peripheral slots in the outer case back to allow the sound to escape. And Langevin’s allegory of the cricket inspired the name of the watch as well, since the ring resembled a chirping insect more than a chiming bell. Ditisheim et Cie received an international trademark on the brand name “Cricket” on February 8, 1946.

Multiple aspects of the Vulcain Cricket design were protected by US patent 2,644,294

The Cricket in New York

After World War II, American businessmen and politicians came to believe that victory was the result of large-scale industry and logistics, rather than the efforts of the soldiers, factory workers, and farmers. This attitude was already widespread before the war, as industrialists like Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and many others established American dominance in large-scale production. The principles of scientific management promoted by Frederick Winslow Taylor lead to a revolution in precision manufacturing under W. Edwards Deming during the war.

André Didisheim (his last name mis-spelled by the Times) came to New York in September of 1947 to discuss restrictions on Swiss watch imports and announce a new product, the Vulcain Cricket!
Image: New York Times, September 23, 1947

This attitude of American business supremacy was concentrated in central Manhattan, home of corporate skyscrapers and soon the new United Nations headquarters. Rich from post-war demand for American products, global investment opportunities, and a focus on continual economic growth made New York the center of the global economy. American businessmen quickly came to define their success based on their own activity, equating a busy day with a productive one. The concentration of activities in Midtown Manhattan and Wall Street meant that a successful businessman had an appointment book full of meetings.

How could a busy man possible keep track of time? This was the question that Vulcain addressed with the Cricket. Rather than announcing the revolutionary new watch at the Basel Fair in the spring, André Didisheim traveled to New York, meeting reporters3 alongside American director Bernard S. Lippman at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel near Central Park. During an interview focused on looming American restrictions on Swiss watch imports, Didisheim also promoted a new watch designed for American businessmen.

Previous alarm watches had struggled to find a use case, but Didisheim saw that an alarm on the wrist would be an ideal fit for a businessman on the go. Didisheim and Lippman promoted the Vulcain Cricket by setting off the alarm during interviews and meetings in New York, spawning an unprecedented wave of interest from reporters and passers-by. The evocatively-named Cricket was in demand even before it was launched, and New York jewelers eagerly awaited the first shipment.

A Slow Global Launch

Incredibly, the Cricket was entirely unknown in Swiss horological circles. The earliest mention of the product in Swiss media did not appear until months after it was already in the hands of American customers: Dr. Henri Buhler mentioned it at the end of a rambling article covering the controversy over the first automatic watch and the announcement of the first serially-produced tourbillon in L’Impartial on December 27.

While we’re on the subject of new developments, let’s mention an invention by Vulcain. It’s a wristwatch equipped with an alarm. It features two mainsprings. The problem of the alarm sound has been ingeniously solved by a double resonant case back. It took Vulcain’s technicians five years of research to overcome all the difficulties. The brilliant Breguet never added an alarm function to a watch, although he did so for clocks. The pocket watch was, for a time, fitted with noisy alarm mechanisms, which fell into disuse as the wristwatch gained popularity. A device with a hand was then applied to the wristwatch. This rather cumbersome solution was not well received. The Vulcain “Cricket” wins the prize for the ingenuity, robustness, and sound quality of its system.

Dr. Henri Buhler, L’Impartial, December 27, 1947

This 1948 article was the first detailed coverage of the Vulcain Cricket

The Vulcain Cricket was not covered in detail in the Swiss press until the January/February 1948 issue of Journal Suisse d’Horlogerie, which published an article by prominent journalist Louis Loze. This was the first detailed description of the watch anywhere, and Loze provided the proper technical and historical context. The article concludes that the Cricket “marks a milestone in the history of the wristwatch.”

The importance of the Cricket soon became clear, with the Journal Suisse d’Horlogerie publishing a technical look at the functionality of the novel movement in March 1949.

The Alarm Watch Craze

The Swiss industry took note, with Ebosa, Lanco, and Jaeger-LeCoultre developing their own competing models for launch at the Basel Fair in 1950. The Ebosa movement was too similar, in fact, and Vulcain successfully sued the company for patent infringement! This is somewhat surprising, since Ebosa had a long history producing larger alarm watches for the “economic” market segment, giving it a good understanding of the complication.

There is no sign of resistance by Vulcain to the Lanco-Fon, which was featured prominently at the fair in 1950, or the Jaeger-LeCoultre Memovox, which was given a subdued launch there. Both watches were widely available later that year, with heavy publicity both in Switzerland and globally.

A wave of new models soon appeared, with the German companies Junghans and Hanhart joined by Swiss dissident Pierce and mainstream Swiss makers Cyma and Roamer. Ebauches SA got into the game as well, with A. Schild and Vénus introducing alarm movements in 1954 and 1955 for ASUAG member companies and the broader market. By 1956 there were dozens of alarm wristwatches on the market, including the Angelus Datalarm, the first to combine an alarm and date window.

But still the Vulcain Cricket reigned supreme. As he left office, the White House News Photographers Association presented American President Harry S Truman with a 14 karat gold Vulcain Cricket. It was engraved “One More Please”, a common shout from the photographers, and remained his favorite watch in retirement.

Truman’s successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was widely seen wearing a Vulcain Cricket while campaigning a year earlier. He purchased it himself, and used the alarm regularly to keep up with his busy schedule. It is even said that he would use the alarm as a way to escape from meetings, much to the chagrin of his schedulers and secretary! Presdent Lyndon B. Johnson regularly presented White House visitors with a Vulcain Cricket watch despite serving in the age of the American-made Bulova Accutron.

American President Truman wearing his prized Vulcain CricketEisenhower purchased a Cricket for himself before becoming president

An Influencer-Driven Marketing Campaign?

The success of the Cricket was impossible to replicate, either by Vulcain or other Swiss watchmakers. It was what would today be called organic and influencer-driven, with customers seeing the watch on the wrists of people they respect and rushing out to buy one for themselves. Rolex had similar success with their own “president’s watch”, the Day-Date, and the same could be said of their Submariner, the Piaget Polo, the Hublot, and others. Today, companies pay for product placement and influencer endorsement, but the public still falls for a trend.

Vulcain deserves credit for creating the right product for the time, and for introducing it in the right way. Perhaps the only person who saw the potential for the Cricket was Argentinian importer Juan Peire, but even he could not have imagined the power of Eisenhower and Truman (and Johnson and Nixon) as product ambassadors! André Didisheim lived an amazing life1, but neither he nor Maurice Ditisheim was a marketing visionary. In fact, Vulcain’s marketing efforts in the 1950s were mediocre compared to companies like Marvin and Juvenia (which were run by their cousins), not to mention Rolex, Universal, or Piaget.

I suppose the true lesson is this: Never underestimate the power of a good product at the right time!

Notes

1. André Didisheim was the son of Edgar Didisheim, heir to his grandfather’s watch company, Marvin. But André was an infant when his father died, so he was raised by his mother, Jenny-Marthe Ditisheim, and became a favorite grandson of Vulcain founder Maurice Ditisheim. André toured Spain with the Madrid FC and Athletic Bilbao football teams under, where he was billed as “André Didixein”, a fact only discovered in 2022. And he very nearly caused an international incident during World War I: He was accused of being a “snitch” when the British navy boarded a Dutch steamship carrying him home from Argentina and arrested dozens of Germans returning to join the war effort. On April 5, 1921, André Didisheim married Juliette-Thérèse Ditesheim, daughter of Movado founder Isidore Ditesheim. It was all very confusing to sort out!
2. Most articles say that Langevin visited Vulcain in 1943 or spent the war in Switzerland. But his time is well-documented, and the septuagenarian physicist would not have been able to travel until he was smuggled out on April 2, 1944. Since Robert Ditisheim’s patent for the Cricket case was filed on July 28 of that year, we know almost exactly when this conversation occurred!
3. The New York Times is fanatical about proofreading, so I feel better knowing that they too could not get André Didisheim’s last name correct. As I said above, he was a Didisheim but heir to the Ditisheim company and married a Ditesheim.

#alarm #AndréDidisheim #AngelusDatalarm #Ebosa #Eisenhower #HenriBuhler #JaegerLeCoultreMemovox #Johnson #LancoFon #LouisLoze #PaulLangevin #RobertDitisheim #Truman #Vulcain #VulcainCricket

The Accidentally-Great Launch of the Vulcain Cricket

The Vulcain Cricket wasn’t the first alarm wristwatch, but it was the first one to find a market. And what a market it found! Launched exclusively in the United States in late 1947, it became the first “it watch”, finding a place on the wrists of presidents and “Mad Men” in the go-go 1950s and kicking off a genuine craze for alarm watches. But Vulcain was not known for great marketing. Was this just a case of having the right product at the right moment?

The Quest for the Alarm Wristwatch

The first alarm wristwatch was the Eterna Cal. 68, introduced in May of 1914. It failed to find a market and vanished into obscurity. And the rise of radium paint eliminated the nascent repeating watch market at that time, too. It seemed that no one wanted or needed an alarm watch. The biggest issue is that the wrist tends to silence the alarm, rendering the complication useless.

As is so often the case, the failure of one product shows the need for another.

By 1925, André Didisheim and his cousins Robert and Maurice Ditisheim were taking charge at Ditisheim et Cie, Fabriques Vulcain et Volta, the La Chaux-de-Fonds watchmaking firm founded by their grandfather in 1858. André was one of the most-interesting people I have encountered in my research: He played professional football in Spain, and traveled the world as heir to Vulcain, Marvin, and (through his wife), Movado!1 A frequent visitor to the booming city of Buenos Aires, Didisheim was meeting with local importer Juan Peire around 1937 when a surprising request came in: Could Vulcain build an alarm wristwatch?

Robert Ditisheim was the inventor of the Vulcain Cricket. His grandfather founded the company in 1858.

André Didisheim knew just who to ask: His cousin Robert Ditisheim was a genius watchmaker and inventor, serving as technical director to the family firm. He had recently developed an ultra-thin watch movement for K. Hattori & Co. of Japan, which imported precision movements produced by the Ditisheim factory. Then he added a chronograph module, enabling Vulcain to produce a column-wheel timer on the market (albeit with no counters).

Robert Ditisheim took up the alarm watch concept with gusto, remembering the alarm and repeating pocket watches and clocks produced by his father under the Vulcain and Volta brand names. On April 20, 1943, while the Allies were pressing Italy and Germany out of North Africa, Ditisheim et Cie filed a patent for a pusher that could control the winding, setting, and silencing of an alarm watch. On September 27, at the height of the Allied invasion of Italy, Ditisheim et Cie filed a patent for a watch case with a mesh back. But Robert Ditisheim was not satisfied that the ring could be heard while the watch was worn on the wrist, spending two more years on this vexing problem.

Nobel Prize-winning French Physicist Paul Langevin was arrested by the Gestapo and held under house arrest in Troyes west of Paris by the Vichy government. Fearing for his safety, the French Resistance secretly moved him to Switzerland, arriving in Porrentruy on May 2, 1944. An illegal refugee, Langevin lived quietly under an assumed name until returning to France in September.

Paul Langevin played a special part in the history of the Vulcain Cricket. During this summer in the Swiss Jura2, Langevin met André Didisheim, perhaps visiting the Vulcain office in La Chaux-de-Fonds. When he heard of Robert’s challenges making the alarm heard while the watch was worn on the wrist, the physicist happily advised to “think of the cricket: so small, yet it sings so loudly!” This was no mere quip: Paul Langevin was the world’s leading authority on acoustics, and knew exactly how insects use “stridulation” to vibrate a tense membrane called a tymbal, serving as a natural amplifier.

Robert Ditisheim was inspired. On July 28, 1944, he filed for a Swiss patent for an alarm case with just such an inner membrane, leaving peripheral slots in the outer case back to allow the sound to escape. And Langevin’s allegory of the cricket inspired the name of the watch as well, since the ring resembled a chirping insect more than a chiming bell. Ditisheim et Cie received an international trademark on the brand name “Cricket” on February 8, 1946.

Multiple aspects of the Vulcain Cricket design were protected by US patent 2,644,294

The Cricket in New York

After World War II, American businessmen and politicians came to believe that victory was the result of large-scale industry and logistics, rather than the efforts of the soldiers, factory workers, and farmers. This attitude was already widespread before the war, as industrialists like Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and many others established American dominance in large-scale production. The principles of scientific management promoted by Frederick Winslow Taylor lead to a revolution in precision manufacturing under W. Edwards Deming during the war.

André Didisheim (his last name mis-spelled by the Times) came to New York in September of 1947 to discuss restrictions on Swiss watch imports and announce a new product, the Vulcain Cricket!
Image: New York Times, September 23, 1947

This attitude of American business supremacy was concentrated in central Manhattan, home of corporate skyscrapers and soon the new United Nations headquarters. Rich from post-war demand for American products, global investment opportunities, and a focus on continual economic growth made New York the center of the global economy. American businessmen quickly came to define their success based on their own activity, equating a busy day with a productive one. The concentration of activities in Midtown Manhattan and Wall Street meant that a successful businessman had an appointment book full of meetings.

How could a busy man possible keep track of time? This was the question that Vulcain addressed with the Cricket. Rather than announcing the revolutionary new watch at the Basel Fair in the spring, André Didisheim traveled to New York, meeting reporters3 alongside American director Bernard S. Lippman at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel near Central Park. During an interview focused on looming American restrictions on Swiss watch imports, Didisheim also promoted a new watch designed for American businessmen.

Previous alarm watches had struggled to find a use case, but Didisheim saw that an alarm on the wrist would be an ideal fit for a businessman on the go. Didisheim and Lippman promoted the Vulcain Cricket by setting off the alarm during interviews and meetings in New York, spawning an unprecedented wave of interest from reporters and passers-by. The evocatively-named Cricket was in demand even before it was launched, and New York jewelers eagerly awaited the first shipment.

A Slow Global Launch

Incredibly, the Cricket was entirely unknown in Swiss horological circles. The earliest mention of the product in Swiss media did not appear until months after it was already in the hands of American customers: Dr. Henri Buhler mentioned it at the end of a rambling article covering the controversy over the first automatic watch and the announcement of the first serially-produced tourbillon in L’Impartial on December 27.

While we’re on the subject of new developments, let’s mention an invention by Vulcain. It’s a wristwatch equipped with an alarm. It features two mainsprings. The problem of the alarm sound has been ingeniously solved by a double resonant case back. It took Vulcain’s technicians five years of research to overcome all the difficulties. The brilliant Breguet never added an alarm function to a watch, although he did so for clocks. The pocket watch was, for a time, fitted with noisy alarm mechanisms, which fell into disuse as the wristwatch gained popularity. A device with a hand was then applied to the wristwatch. This rather cumbersome solution was not well received. The Vulcain “Cricket” wins the prize for the ingenuity, robustness, and sound quality of its system.

Dr. Henri Buhler, L’Impartial, December 27, 1947

This 1948 article was the first detailed coverage of the Vulcain Cricket

The Vulcain Cricket was not covered in detail in the Swiss press until the January/February 1948 issue of Journal Suisse d’Horlogerie, which published an article by prominent journalist Louis Loze. This was the first detailed description of the watch anywhere, and Loze provided the proper technical and historical context. The article concludes that the Cricket “marks a milestone in the history of the wristwatch.”

The importance of the Cricket soon became clear, with the Journal Suisse d’Horlogerie publishing a technical look at the functionality of the novel movement in March 1949.

The Alarm Watch Craze

The Swiss industry took note, with Ebosa, Lanco, and Jaeger-LeCoultre developing their own competing models for launch at the Basel Fair in 1950. The Ebosa movement was too similar, in fact, and Vulcain successfully sued the company for patent infringement! This is somewhat surprising, since Ebosa had a long history producing larger alarm watches for the “economic” market segment, giving it a good understanding of the complication.

There is no sign of resistance by Vulcain to the Lanco-Fon, which was featured prominently at the fair in 1950, or the Jaeger-LeCoultre Memovox, which was given a subdued launch there. Both watches were widely available later that year, with heavy publicity both in Switzerland and globally.

A wave of new models soon appeared, with the German companies Junghans and Hanhart joined by Swiss dissident Pierce and mainstream Swiss makers Cyma and Roamer. Ebauches SA got into the game as well, with A. Schild and Vénus introducing alarm movements in 1954 and 1955 for ASUAG member companies and the broader market. By 1956 there were dozens of alarm wristwatches on the market, including the Angelus Datalarm, the first to combine an alarm and date window.

But still the Vulcain Cricket reigned supreme. As he left office, the White House News Photographers Association presented American President Harry S Truman with a 14 karat gold Vulcain Cricket. It was engraved “One More Please”, a common shout from the photographers, and remained his favorite watch in retirement.

Truman’s successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was widely seen wearing a Vulcain Cricket while campaigning a year earlier. He purchased it himself, and used the alarm regularly to keep up with his busy schedule. It is even said that he would use the alarm as a way to escape from meetings, much to the chagrin of his schedulers and secretary! Presdent Lyndon B. Johnson regularly presented White House visitors with a Vulcain Cricket watch despite serving in the age of the American-made Bulova Accutron.

American President Truman wearing his prized Vulcain CricketEisenhower purchased a Cricket for himself before becoming president

An Influencer-Driven Marketing Campaign?

The success of the Cricket was impossible to replicate, either by Vulcain or other Swiss watchmakers. It was what would today be called organic and influencer-driven, with customers seeing the watch on the wrists of people they respect and rushing out to buy one for themselves. Rolex had similar success with their own “president’s watch”, the Day-Date, and the same could be said of their Submariner, the Piaget Polo, the Hublot, and others. Today, companies pay for product placement and influencer endorsement, but the public still falls for a trend.

Vulcain deserves credit for creating the right product for the time, and for introducing it in the right way. Perhaps the only person who saw the potential for the Cricket was Argentinian importer Juan Peire, but even he could not have imagined the power of Eisenhower and Truman (and Johnson and Nixon) as product ambassadors! André Didisheim lived an amazing life1, but neither he nor Maurice Ditisheim was a marketing visionary. In fact, Vulcain’s marketing efforts in the 1950s were mediocre compared to companies like Marvin and Juvenia (which were run by their cousins), not to mention Rolex, Universal, or Piaget.

I suppose the true lesson is this: Never underestimate the power of a good product at the right time!

Notes

1. André Didisheim was the son of Edgar Didisheim, heir to his grandfather’s watch company, Marvin. But André was an infant when his father died, so he was raised by his mother, Jenny-Marthe Ditisheim, and became a favorite grandson of Vulcain founder Maurice Ditisheim. André toured Spain with the Madrid FC and Athletic Bilbao football teams under, where he was billed as “André Didixein”, a fact only discovered in 2022. And he very nearly caused an international incident during World War I: He was accused of being a “snitch” when the British navy boarded a Dutch steamship carrying him home from Argentina and arrested dozens of Germans returning to join the war effort. On April 5, 1921, André Didisheim married Juliette-Thérèse Ditesheim, daughter of Movado founder Isidore Ditesheim. It was all very confusing to sort out!
2. Most articles say that Langevin visited Vulcain in 1943 or spent the war in Switzerland. But his time is well-documented, and the septuagenarian physicist would not have been able to travel until he was smuggled out on April 2, 1944. Since Robert Ditisheim’s patent for the Cricket case was filed on July 28 of that year, we know almost exactly when this conversation occurred!
3. The New York Times is fanatical about proofreading, so I feel better knowing that they too could not get André Didisheim’s last name correct. As I said above, he was a Didisheim but heir to the Ditisheim company and married a Ditesheim.

Our friends over at Wind Vintage have a great collector’s guide to the original Vulcain Cricket with tons of photos!

#alarm #AndréDidisheim #AngelusDatalarm #Ebosa #Eisenhower #HenriBuhler #JaegerLeCoultreMemovox #Johnson #LancoFon #LouisLoze #PaulLangevin #RobertDitisheim #Truman #Vulcain #VulcainCricket

The Accidentally-Great Launch of the Vulcain Cricket

The Vulcain Cricket wasn’t the first alarm wristwatch, but it was the first one to find a market. And what a market it found! Launched exclusively in the United States in late 1947, it became the first “it watch”, finding a place on the wrists of presidents and “Mad Men” in the go-go 1950s and kicking off a genuine craze for alarm watches. But Vulcain was not known for great marketing. Was this just a case of having the right product at the right moment?

The Quest for the Alarm Wristwatch

The first alarm wristwatch was the Eterna Cal. 68, introduced in May of 1914. It failed to find a market and vanished into obscurity. And the rise of radium paint eliminated the nascent repeating watch market at that time, too. It seemed that no one wanted or needed an alarm watch. The biggest issue is that the wrist tends to silence the alarm, rendering the complication useless.

As is so often the case, the failure of one product shows the need for another.

By 1925, André Didisheim and his cousins Robert and Maurice Ditisheim were taking charge at Ditisheim et Cie, Fabriques Vulcain et Volta, the La Chaux-de-Fonds watchmaking firm founded by their grandfather in 1858. André was one of the most-interesting people I have encountered in my research: He played professional football in Spain, and traveled the world as heir to Vulcain, Marvin, and (through his wife), Movado!1 A frequent visitor to the booming city of Buenos Aires, Didisheim was meeting with local importer Juan Peire around 1937 when a surprising request came in: Could Vulcain build an alarm wristwatch?

Robert Ditisheim was the inventor of the Vulcain Cricket. His grandfather founded the company in 1858.

André Didisheim knew just who to ask: His cousin Robert Ditisheim was a genius watchmaker and inventor, serving as technical director to the family firm. He had recently developed an ultra-thin watch movement for K. Hattori & Co. of Japan, which imported precision movements produced by the Ditisheim factory. Then he added a chronograph module, enabling Vulcain to produce a column-wheel timer on the market (albeit with no counters).

Robert Ditisheim took up the alarm watch concept with gusto, remembering the alarm and repeating pocket watches and clocks produced by his father under the Vulcain and Volta brand names. On April 20, 1943, while the Allies were pressing Italy and Germany out of North Africa, Ditisheim et Cie filed a patent for a pusher that could control the winding, setting, and silencing of an alarm watch. On September 27, at the height of the Allied invasion of Italy, Ditisheim et Cie filed a patent for a watch case with a mesh back. But Robert Ditisheim was not satisfied that the ring could be heart while the watch was worn on the wrist, spending two more years on this vexing problem.

Nobel Prize-winning French Physicist Paul Langevin was arrested by the Gestapo and held under house arrest in Troyes west of Paris by the Vichy government. Fearing for his safety, the French Resistance secretly moved him to Switzerland, arriving in Porrentry on May 2, 1944. An illegal refugee, Langevin lived quietly under an assumed name until returning to France in September.

Paul Langevin played a special part in the history of the Vulcain Cricket. During this summer in the Swiss Jura2, Langevin met André Didisheim, perhaps visiting the Vulcain office in La Chaux-de-Fonds. When he heard of Robert’s challenges making the alarm heard while the watch was worn on the wrist, the physicist happily advised to “think of the cricket: so small, yet it sings so loudly!” This was no mere quip: Paul Langevin was the world’s leading authority on acoustics, and knew exactly how insects use “stridulation” to vibrate a tense membrane called a tymbal, serving as a natural amplifier.

Robert Ditisheim was inspired. On July 28, 1944, he filed for a Swiss patent for an alarm case with just such an inner membrane, leaving peripheral slots in the outer case back to allow the sound to escape. And Langevin’s allegory of the cricket inspired the name of the watch as well, since the ring resembled a chirping insect more than a chiming bell. Ditisheim et Cie received an international trademark on the brand name “Cricket” on February 8, 1946.

Multiple aspects of the Vulcain Cricket design were protected by US patent 2,644,294

The Cricket in New York

After World War II, American businessmen and politicians came to believe that victory was the result of large-scale industry and logistics, rather than the efforts of the soldiers, factory workers, and farmers. This attitude was already widespread before the war, as industrialists like Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and many others established American dominance in large-scale production. The principles of scientific management promoted by Frederick Winslow Taylor lead to a revolution in precision manufacturing under W. Edwards Deming during the war.

André Didisheim (his last name mis-spelled by the Times) came to New York in September of 1947 to discuss restrictions on Swiss watch imports and announce a new product, the Vulcain Cricket!
Image: New York Times, September 23, 1947

This attitude of American business supremacy was concentrated in central Manhattan, home of corporate skyscrapers and soon the new United Nations headquarters. Rich from post-war demand for American products, global investment opportunities, and a focus on continual economic growth made New York the center of the global economy. American businessmen quickly came to define their success based on their own activity, equating a busy day with a productive one. The concentration of activities in Midtown Manhattan and Wall Street meant that a successful businessman had an appointment book full of meetings.

How could a busy man possible keep track of time? This was the question that Vulcain addressed with the Cricket. Rather than announcing the revolutionary new watch at the Basel Fair in the spring, André Didisheim traveled to New York, meeting reporters3 alongside American director Bernard S. Lippman at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel near Central Park. During an interview focused on looming American restrictions on Swiss watch imports, Didisheim also promoted a new watch designed for American businessmen.

Previous alarm watches had struggled to find a use case, but Didisheim saw that an alarm on the wrist would be an ideal fit for a businessman on the go. Didisheim and Lippman promoted the Vulcain Cricket by setting off the alarm during interviews and meetings in New York, spawning an unprecedented wave of interest from reporters and passers-by. The evocatively-named Cricket was in demand even before it was launched, and New York jewelers eagerly awaited the first shipment.

A Slow Global Launch

Incredibly, the Cricket was entirely unknown in Swiss horological circles. The earliest mention of the product in Swiss media did not appear until months after it was already in the hands of American customers: Dr. Henri Buhler mentioned it at the end of a rambling article covering the controversy over the first automatic watch and the announcement of the first serially-produced tourbillon in L’Impartial on December 27.

While we’re on the subject of new developments, let’s mention an invention by Vulcain. It’s a wristwatch equipped with an alarm. It features two mainsprings. The problem of the alarm sound has been ingeniously solved by a double resonant case back. It took Vulcain’s technicians five years of research to overcome all the difficulties. The brilliant Breguet never added an alarm function to a watch, although he did so for clocks. The pocket watch was, for a time, fitted with noisy alarm mechanisms, which fell into disuse as the wristwatch gained popularity. A device with a hand was then applied to the wristwatch. This rather cumbersome solution was not well received. The Vulcain “Cricket” wins the prize for the ingenuity, robustness, and sound quality of its system.

Dr. Henri Buhler, L’Impartial, December 27, 1947

This 1948 article was the first detailed coverage of the Vulcain Cricket

The Vulcain Cricket was not covered in detail in the Swiss press until the January/February 1948 issue of Journal Suisse d’Horlogerie, which published an article by prominent journalist Louis Loze. This was the first detailed description of the watch anywhere, and Loze provided the proper technical and historical context. The article concludes that the Cricket “marks a milestone in the history of the wristwatch.”

The importance of the Cricket soon became clear, with the Journal Suisse d’Horlogerie publishing a technical look at the functionality of the novel movement in March 1949.

The Alarm Watch Craze

The Swiss industry took note, with Ebosa, Lanco, and Jaeger-LeCoultre developing their own competing models for launch at the Basel Fair in 1950. The Ebosa movement was too similar, in fact, and Vulcain successfully sued the company for patent infringement! This is somewhat surprising, since Ebosa had a long history producing larger alarm watches for the “economic” market segment, giving it a good understanding of the complication.

There is no sign of resistance by Vulcain to the Lanco-Fon, which was featured prominently at the fair in 1950, or the Jaeger-LeCoultre Memovox, which was given a subdued launch there. Both watches were widely available later that year, with heavy publicity both in Switzerland and globally.

A wave of new models soon appeared, with the German companies Junghans and Hanhart joined by Swiss dissident Pierce and mainstream Swiss makers Cyma and Roamer. Ebauches SA got into the game as well, with A. Schild and Vénus introducing alarm movements in 1954 and 1955 for ASUAG member companies and the broader market. By 1956 there were dozens of alarm wristwatches on the market, including the Angelus Datalarm, the first to combine an alarm and date window.

But still the Vulcain Cricket reigned supreme. As he left office, the White House News Photographers Association presented American President Harry S Truman with a 14 karat gold Vulcain Cricket. It was engraved “One More Please”, a common shout from the photographers, and remained his favorite watch in retirement.

Truman’s successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was widely seen wearing a Vulcain Cricket while campaigning a year earlier. He purchased it himself, and used the alarm regularly to keep up with his busy schedule. It is even said that he would use the alarm as a way to escape from meetings, much to the chagrin of his schedulers and secretary! Presdent Lyndon B. Johnson regularly presented White House visitors with a Vulcain Cricket watch despite serving in the age of the American-made Bulova Accutron.

American President Truman wearing his prized Vulcain CricketEisenhower purchased a Cricket for himself before becoming president

An Influencer-Driven Marketing Campaign?

The success of the Cricket was impossible to replicate, either by Vulcain or other Swiss watchmakers. It was what would today be called organic and influencer-driven, with customers seeing the watch on the wrists of people they respect and rushing out to buy one for themselves. Rolex had similar success with their own “president’s watch”, the Day-Date, and the same could be said of their Submariner, the Piaget Polo, the Hublot, and others. Today, companies pay for product placement and influencer endorsement, but the public still falls for a trend.

Vulcain deserves credit for creating the right product for the time, and for introducing it in the right way. Perhaps the only person who saw the potential for the Cricket was Argentinian importer Juan Peire, but even he could not have imagined the power of Eisenhower and Truman (and Johnson and Nixon) as product ambassadors! André Didisheim lived an amazing life1, but neither he nor Maurice Ditisheim was a marketing visionary. In fact, Vulcain’s marketing efforts in the 1950s were mediocre compared to companies like Marvin and Juvenia (which were run by their cousins), not to mention Rolex, Universal, or Piaget.

I suppose the true lesson is this: Never underestimate the power of a good product at the right time!

Notes

1. André Didisheim was the son of Edgar Didisheim, heir to his grandfather’s watch company, Marvin. But André was an infant when his father died, so he was raised by his mother, Jenny-Marthe Ditisheim, and became a favorite grandson of Vulcain founder Maurice Ditisheim. André toured Spain with the Madrid FC and Athletic Bilbao football teams under, where he was billed as “André Didixein”, a fact only discovered in 2022. And he very nearly caused an international incident during World War I: He was accused of being a “snitch” when the British navy boarded a Dutch steamship carrying him home from Argentina and arrested dozens of Germans returning to join the war effort. On April 5, 1921, André Didisheim married Juliette-Thérèse Ditesheim, daughter of Movado founder Isidore Ditesheim. It was all very confusing to sort out!
2. Most articles say that Langevin visited Vulcain in 1943 or spent the war in Switzerland. But his time is well-documented, and the septuagenarian physicist would not have been able to travel until he was smuggled out on April 2, 1944. Since Robert Ditisheim’s patent for the Cricket case was filed on July 28 of that year, we know almost exactly when this conversation occurred!
3. The New York Times is fanatical about proofreading, so I feel better knowing that they too could not get André Didisheim’s last name correct. As I said above, he was a Didisheim but heir to the Ditisheim company and married a Ditesheim.

#alarm #AndréDidisheim #AngelusDatalarm #Ebosa #Eisenhower #HenriBuhler #JaegerLeCoultreMemovox #Johnson #LancoFon #LouisLoze #PaulLangevin #RobertDitisheim #Truman #Vulcain #VulcainCricket

The Accidentally-Great Launch of the Vulcain Cricket

The Vulcain Cricket wasn’t the first alarm wristwatch, but it was the first one to find a market. And what a market it found! Launched exclusively in the United States in late 1947, it became the first “it watch”, finding a place on the wrists of presidents and “Mad Men” in the go-go 1950s and kicking off a genuine craze for alarm watches. But Vulcain was not known for great marketing. Was this just a case of having the right product at the right moment?

The Quest for the Alarm Wristwatch

The first alarm wristwatch was the Eterna Cal. 68, introduced in May of 1914. It failed to find a market and vanished into obscurity. And the rise of radium paint eliminated the nascent repeating watch market at that time, too. It seemed that no one wanted or needed an alarm watch. The biggest issue is that the wrist tends to silence the alarm, rendering the complication useless.

As is so often the case, the failure of one product shows the need for another.

By 1925, André Didisheim and his cousins Robert and Maurice Ditisheim were taking charge at Ditisheim et Cie, Fabriques Vulcain et Volta, the La Chaux-de-Fonds watchmaking firm founded by their grandfather in 1858. André was one of the most-interesting people I have encountered in my research: He played professional football in Spain, and traveled the world as heir to Vulcain, Marvin, and (through his wife), Movado!1 A frequent visitor to the booming city of Buenos Aires, Didisheim was meeting with local importer Juan Peire around 1937 when a surprising request came in: Could Vulcain build an alarm wristwatch?

Robert Ditisheim was the inventor of the Vulcain Cricket. His grandfather founded the company in 1858.

André Didisheim knew just who to ask: His cousin Robert Ditisheim was a genius watchmaker and inventor, serving as technical director to the family firm. He had recently developed an ultra-thin watch movement for K. Hattori & Co. of Japan, which imported precision movements produced by the Ditisheim factory. Then he added a chronograph module, enabling Vulcain to produce a column-wheel timer on the market (albeit with no counters).

Robert Ditisheim took up the alarm watch concept with gusto, remembering the alarm and repeating pocket watches and clocks produced by his father under the Vulcain and Volta brand names. On April 20, 1943, while the Allies were pressing Italy and Germany out of North Africa, Ditisheim et Cie filed a patent for a pusher that could control the winding, setting, and silencing of an alarm watch. On September 27, at the height of the Allied invasion of Italy, Ditisheim et Cie filed a patent for a watch case with a mesh back. But Robert Ditisheim was not satisfied that the ring could be heart while the watch was worn on the wrist, spending two more years on this vexing problem.

Nobel Prize-winning French Physicist Paul Langevin was arrested by the Gestapo and held under house arrest in Troyes west of Paris by the Vichy government. Fearing for his safety, the French Resistance secretly moved him to Switzerland, arriving in Porrentry on May 2, 1944. An illegal refugee, Langevin lived quietly under an assumed name until returning to France in September.

Paul Langevin played a special part in the history of the Vulcain Cricket. During this summer in the Swiss Jura2, Langevin met André Didisheim, perhaps visiting the Vulcain office in La Chaux-de-Fonds. When he heard of Robert’s challenges making the alarm heard while the watch was worn on the wrist, the physicist happily advised to “think of the cricket: so small, yet it sings so loudly!” This was no mere quip: Paul Langevin was the world’s leading authority on acoustics, and knew exactly how insects use “stridulation” to vibrate a tense membrane called a tymbal, serving as a natural amplifier.

Robert Ditisheim was inspired. On July 28, 1944, he filed for a Swiss patent for an alarm case with just such an inner membrane, leaving peripheral slots in the outer case back to allow the sound to escape. And Langevin’s allegory of the cricket inspired the name of the watch as well, since the ring resembled a chirping insect more than a chiming bell. Ditisheim et Cie received an international trademark on the brand name “Cricket” on February 8, 1946.

Multiple aspects of the Vulcain Cricket design were protected by US patent 2,644,294

The Cricket in New York

After World War II, American businessmen and politicians came to believe that victory was the result of large-scale industry and logistics, rather than the efforts of the soldiers, factory workers, and farmers. This attitude was already widespread before the war, as industrialists like Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and many others established American dominance in large-scale production. The principles of scientific management promoted by Frederick Winslow Taylor lead to a revolution in precision manufacturing under W. Edwards Deming during the war.

André Didisheim (his last name mis-spelled by the Times) came to New York in September of 1947 to discuss restrictions on Swiss watch imports and announce a new product, the Vulcain Cricket!
Image: New York Times, September 23, 1947

This attitude of American business supremacy was concentrated in central Manhattan, home of corporate skyscrapers and soon the new United Nations headquarters. Rich from post-war demand for American products, global investment opportunities, and a focus on continual economic growth made New York the center of the global economy. American businessmen quickly came to define their success based on their own activity, equating a busy day with a productive one. The concentration of activities in Midtown Manhattan and Wall Street meant that a successful businessman had an appointment book full of meetings.

How could a busy man possible keep track of time? This was the question that Vulcain addressed with the Cricket. Rather than announcing the revolutionary new watch at the Basel Fair in the spring, André Didisheim traveled to New York, meeting reporters3 alongside American director Bernard S. Lippman at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel near Central Park. During an interview focused on looming American restrictions on Swiss watch imports, Didisheim also promoted a new watch designed for American businessmen.

Previous alarm watches had struggled to find a use case, but Didisheim saw that an alarm on the wrist would be an ideal fit for a businessman on the go. Didisheim and Lippman promoted the Vulcain Cricket by setting off the alarm during interviews and meetings in New York, spawning an unprecedented wave of interest from reporters and passers-by. The evocatively-named Cricket was in demand even before it was launched, and New York jewelers eagerly awaited the first shipment.

A Slow Global Launch

Incredibly, the Cricket was entirely unknown in Swiss horological circles. The earliest mention of the product in Swiss media did not appear until months after it was already in the hands of American customers: Dr. Henri Buhler mentioned it at the end of a rambling article covering the controversy over the first automatic watch and the announcement of the first serially-produced tourbillon in L’Impartial on December 27.

While we’re on the subject of new developments, let’s mention an invention by Vulcain. It’s a wristwatch equipped with an alarm. It features two mainsprings. The problem of the alarm sound has been ingeniously solved by a double resonant case back. It took Vulcain’s technicians five years of research to overcome all the difficulties. The brilliant Breguet never added an alarm function to a watch, although he did so for clocks. The pocket watch was, for a time, fitted with noisy alarm mechanisms, which fell into disuse as the wristwatch gained popularity. A device with a hand was then applied to the wristwatch. This rather cumbersome solution was not well received. The Vulcain “Cricket” wins the prize for the ingenuity, robustness, and sound quality of its system.

Dr. Henri Buhler, L’Impartial, December 27, 1947

This 1948 article was the first detailed coverage of the Vulcain Cricket

The Vulcain Cricket was not covered in detail in the Swiss press until the January/February 1948 issue of Journal Suisse d’Horlogerie, which published an article by prominent journalist Louis Loze. This was the first detailed description of the watch anywhere, and Loze provided the proper technical and historical context. The article concludes that the Cricket “marks a milestone in the history of the wristwatch.”

The importance of the Cricket soon became clear, with the Journal Suisse d’Horlogerie publishing a technical look at the functionality of the novel movement in March 1949.

The Alarm Watch Craze

The Swiss industry took note, with Ebosa, Lanco, and Jaeger-LeCoultre developing their own competing models for launch at the Basel Fair in 1950. The Ebosa movement was too similar, in fact, and Vulcain successfully sued the company for patent infringement! This is somewhat surprising, since Ebosa had a long history producing larger alarm watches for the “economic” market segment, giving it a good understanding of the complication.

There is no sign of resistance by Vulcain to the Lanco-Fon, which was featured prominently at the fair in 1950, or the Jaeger-LeCoultre Memovox, which was given a subdued launch there. Both watches were widely available later that year, with heavy publicity both in Switzerland and globally.

A wave of new models soon appeared, with the German companies Junghans and Hanhart joined by Swiss dissident Pierce and mainstream Swiss makers Cyma and Roamer. Ebauches SA got into the game as well, with A. Schild and Vénus introducing alarm movements in 1954 and 1955 for ASUAG member companies and the broader market. By 1956 there were dozens of alarm wristwatches on the market, including the Angelus Datalarm, the first to combine an alarm and date window.

But still the Vulcain Cricket reigned supreme. As he left office, the White House News Photographers Association presented American President Harry S Truman with a 14 karat gold Vulcain Cricket. It was engraved “One More Please”, a common shout from the photographers, and remained his favorite watch in retirement.

Truman’s successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was widely seen wearing a Vulcain Cricket while campaigning a year earlier. He purchased it himself, and used the alarm regularly to keep up with his busy schedule. It is even said that he would use the alarm as a way to escape from meetings, much to the chagrin of his schedulers and secretary! Presdent Lyndon B. Johnson regularly presented White House visitors with a Vulcain Cricket watch despite serving in the age of the American-made Bulova Accutron.

American President Truman wearing his prized Vulcain CricketEisenhower purchased a Cricket for himself before becoming president

An Influencer-Driven Marketing Campaign?

The success of the Cricket was impossible to replicate, either by Vulcain or other Swiss watchmakers. It was what would today be called organic and influencer-driven, with customers seeing the watch on the wrists of people they respect and rushing out to buy one for themselves. Rolex had similar success with their own “president’s watch”, the Day-Date, and the same could be said of their Submariner, the Piaget Polo, the Hublot, and others. Today, companies pay for product placement and influencer endorsement, but the public still falls for a trend.

Vulcain deserves credit for creating the right product for the time, and for introducing it in the right way. Perhaps the only person who saw the potential for the Cricket was Argentinian importer Juan Peire, but even he could not have imagined the power of Eisenhower and Truman (and Johnson and Nixon) as product ambassadors! André Didisheim lived an amazing life1, but neither he nor Maurice Ditisheim was a marketing visionary. In fact, Vulcain’s marketing efforts in the 1950s were mediocre compared to companies like Marvin and Juvenia (which were run by their cousins), not to mention Rolex, Universal, or Piaget.

I suppose the true lesson is this: Never underestimate the power of a good product at the right time!

Notes

1. André Didisheim was the son of Edgar Didisheim, heir to his grandfather’s watch company, Marvin. But André was an infant when his father died, so he was raised by his mother, Jenny-Marthe Ditisheim, and became a favorite grandson of Vulcain founder Maurice Ditisheim. André toured Spain with the Madrid FC and Athletic Bilbao football teams under, where he was billed as “André Didixein”, a fact only discovered in 2022. And he very nearly caused an international incident during World War I: He was accused of being a “snitch” when the British navy boarded a Dutch steamship carrying him home from Argentina and arrested dozens of Germans returning to join the war effort. On April 5, 1921, André Didisheim married Juliette-Thérèse Ditesheim, daughter of Movado founder Isidore Ditesheim. It was all very confusing to sort out!
2. Most articles say that Langevin visited Vulcain in 1943 or spent the war in Switzerland. But his time is well-documented, and the septuagenarian physicist would not have been able to travel until he was smuggled out on April 2, 1944. Since Robert Ditisheim’s patent for the Cricket case was filed on July 28 of that year, we know almost exactly when this conversation occurred!
3. The New York Times is fanatical about proofreading, so I feel better knowing that they too could not get André Didisheim’s last name correct. As I said above, he was a Didisheim but heir to the Ditisheim company and married a Ditesheim.

#alarm #AndréDidisheim #AngelusDatalarm #Ebosa #Eisenhower #HenriBuhler #JaegerLeCoultreMemovox #Johnson #LancoFon #LouisLoze #PaulLangevin #RobertDitisheim #Truman #Vulcain #VulcainCricket