It’s fairly easy, if asked to reel off a list of Swiss watch brands; these days it’s even pretty simple to name a few British and then maybe throw in some Italians and a few French. Coming up with American watch brands though, is a little harder. The names don’t exactly trip off the tongue, which is a shame because, back in the late 1800s, the US was giving the Swiss a run for its money when it came to producing accurate, reliable timepieces.

So advanced was US watchmaking that in the late 1870s a Swiss engineer called Jacques David was sent to the US to conduct industrial espionage at both Waltham and Elgin’s factories. He returned with such a damning surmisal of the Swiss watch industry’s failings that the report was labelled “secret” and buried, but not before the Swiss took note and began to mass produce themselves.

Shinola

Despite Switzerland getting its mojo back, US brands continued to dominate the domestic market before the entire enterprise was destroyed by WWII. When the US entered the war, watch factory machines were put to use making artillery shells, military clocks and precision instruments. The Swiss, being neutral, continued to make technological advances and were also still able to export thanks to special permission from the Nazi government.

Hamilton was one of the few names who continued to produce watches and who supplied 9,800 marine chronometers to the US Navy and one million watches to the Armed Forces. By the late 1950s, the likes of Elgin and Waltham were wrapping up business and by the 1970s the US domestic watch market had died.

Recently, however, there has been a resurgence in brands that are assembling watches in the US, making in-roads into bringing back life in an industry that has been dormant for over 30 years. Here are just a few of the names that are making American watchmaking great again.