Doxa

Georges Ducommun founded Doxa in Le Locle in 1889. The firm made pocket watches, eight-day watches and car clocks before turning to wristwatches.

In 1967 Doxa introduced the SUB 300, a professional diver's watch with a bright orange dial chosen for legibility under water and a rotating bezel engraved with a no-decompression dive table, so that the diver could read the time allowed at a given depth. The SUB became Doxa's best-known product and has been reissued many times.

How to recognise the work: the name, Greek for 'glory', appears on dials from the early pocket watches onwards. Pre-war and 1950s wristwatches are mostly modest dress and 'anti-magnetic' models in steel, gold plate or gold; the Grafic of 1957 has a square case, a dial divided by crossing rays and the logo set low on the right. SUB divers' watches from 1967 have cushion-shaped steel cases, a rotating bezel engraved with a no-decompression table and, most often, the orange dial.

The SUB was developed by Doxa's product manager Urs Eschle with the diver Claude Wesly; tests in Lake Neuchâtel showed that orange stayed legible longest in murky water. The SUB 300T of 1968 was rated by Doxa to 1,200 metres and from 1969 could be had with a helium release valve, one of the first on a watch sold to the public. The Swiss Army bought SUBs for its new combat-diver unit between 1968 and 1979, and the US Navy issued SUB 300T watches to aquanauts of its SEALAB III programme in 1968.

Before the divers' watches, Georges Ducommun patented an eight-day movement in 1907 for the dashboards of cars, aircraft and ships, and Doxa supplied dashboard clocks to car makers including Bugatti. After his death in 1936 the firm was run by his son-in-law Jacques Nardin, a grandson of Ulysse Nardin. Doxa joined Synchron in 1968, passed to Aubry Frères in 1978 and stopped production in 1983; the Jenny family of Biel revived it in 1997 and reissued the SUB in 2000.