Horology history - Incabloc and the Tour de France
Does anyone even remember that the company from La Chaux-de-Fonds used to sponsor the Tour de France? It's hard to find a more popular sport.
By Joel Grandjean
Editor-in-Chief
It was management's decision to have Incabloc sponsor the Tour de France back then. They thought it was the best way to convince their clients that all mechanical watches in the world would one day be equipped with their mini shock absorbers. At the time, of course, there were no doping scandals or television rights issues. Furthermore, subcontractors in the industry did not understand that they had the right to communicate without being in violation of their culture of secrecy. Incabloc's daring approach to advertising was therefore a textbook case.
Before the advent of this remarkable lyre-shaped invention, whenever a watch fell down accidentally, its movement would usually end up broken.
Incabloc is both a product and a brand stemming from the collaboration in the early 1930s between two engineers from the famed ETH university in Zurich, namely Fritz Marti and Georges Braunschweig. Together, they had the idea of offering watchmakers complete, pre-assembled shock absorbers adapted to their movements. This had never been done before. Nowadays, this ingenious device still equips most mechanical watches and Swiss or foreign manufactures.
Incabloc models
In 1988, Eric Zutter acquired the Incabloc division, at the time still owned by the original company, Portescap in La Chaux-de-Fonds. Before the crisis in the 1970s and before Swiss mechanical watchmaking came back from the abyss, the fact that each watch included 17 to 23 rubies, each acting as a shock absorber, had allowed the supplier to amass quite a fortune at one time. This, in turn, was the reason Incabloc could run with the big names in terms of communication.
