J. Assmann

Julius Assmann was born in Stettin on 2 October 1827 and learned watchmaking there. During his journeyman years he worked in Berlin, probably for the court chronometer maker Christian Friedrich Tiede, and in 1850 he joined Ferdinand Adolph Lange's young firm in Glashütte, the mining town in the Ore Mountains where Lange had begun training watchmakers in 1845. In 1852, with Lange's encouragement, Assmann set up his own business in the town, the J. Assmann Deutsche Anker-Uhren-Fabrik ('German lever watch factory'), financed from his inheritance. It was the second watch firm in Glashütte, and it helped turn the town into a watchmaking centre; when Assmann asked the Saxon government for a loan in 1859, it was granted after Lange supported the request.

Assmann's watches follow the Glashütte style: a German-silver three-quarter plate, gold chatons screwed into the plate, a straight-line lever escapement with a Glashütte-type pallet fork and a cut bimetallic balance, often with a blued Breguet balance spring. Many were cased in gold for export, and the firm had a substantial trade with South and Central America; its trademark shows a shield with the crossed hammer and pick of the Glashütte town arms. In 1865, after the death of his first wife, Assmann married Lange's daughter Marie. He helped found the German Watchmaking School in Glashütte in 1878 and became chairman of its board in 1885; he died on 15 August 1886.

His son Paul Assmann, a partner from 1877, ran the firm after his death. In 1894 it joined the German-American watchmaker Dietrich Gruen in a Glashütte firm, Grün & Assmann, which made high-grade movements for Gruen's watches. The Assmann company did not survive the economic difficulties of the 1920s and closed in the mid-1920s. Glashütte Original's 'Julius Assmann' series of limited editions recalls the name today.