When Watchmakers Imagined Tomorrow’s World

They predicted empires, electronics, and craft. With hindsight, their visions reveal watchmaking’s enduring struggle to reconcile progress with the need for permanence.

At the turn of the millennium, five leading voices in Swiss watchmaking reflected on the forces reshaping their industry—group consolidation, technological change, shifting notions of luxury. First published in the Swiss Watch Journal in February 2000, their visions are retold here as a unified meditation, viewed through the lens of 2025.

I recall a mome…