NOMOS Glashütte

NOMOS Glashütte was founded in January 1990 by Roland Schwertner, an IT specialist and photographer from Düsseldorf, two months after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The name had been used before: from 1906 a Nomos-Uhr-Gesellschaft sold Swiss watches marked 'Glashütte' until A. Lange & Söhne took it to court and it ceased trading in 1910, but the two companies share nothing but the name. The first collection, drawn up by the designer Susanne Günther in the spirit of the Bauhaus and the Deutscher Werkbund, appeared in 1992; its Tangente, with thin hands, a small seconds dial and slim case, remains the brand's best-known watch.

The first watches used Swiss hand-wound movements of the Peseux 7001 family, reworked in Glashütte with the town's traditional features such as a three-quarter plate and sunburst-decorated plates and wheels. From the 2000s NOMOS made more and more of its own movements, including automatic calibres; in 2014 it introduced its own escapement, the NOMOS swing system, so that the balance, balance spring and lever are made in-house — unusual for a firm outside the largest groups. The thin neomatik automatic calibres followed from 2015. The company works from the former Glashütte railway station and a chronometry building that once housed a marine-chronometer workshop, and says it makes more mechanical watches than any other German manufacturer.