Erwin Bernheim

Erwin Bernheim (born June 14, 1925 in Zurich ; † November 29, 2007 in Meilen ) was a Swiss entrepreneur in the watch industry.

Life

Erwin Bernheim grew up in the formerly independent Zurich municipality of Witikon . He attended secondary school in the city of Zurich. His father was a master tailor. When he fell ill and died early, his son Erwin took over his father's small men's clothing company together with his mother as a teenager. Many Jewish refugees who found shelter in Switzerland during the Second World War moved to other countries after the war. The Bernheim family had contacts with such refugees. After they left, such emigrants asked Bernheim to get watches for them. The number of inquiries increased to such an extent that from 1947 Bernheim devoted himself entirely to the watch trade. With his friend Egon Frank, who emigrated to Brazil, he founded Mondaine Watch Ltd. in 1951 . They bought the watches they needed from small watch manufacturers and carried out rigorous functional checks before they were shipped. In 1958, the partners decided to manufacture watches themselves. First the company Neuchâtel Watch was acquired as a production base for anchor watches. The Remonta factory was later built in Biberist in the canton of Solothurn . For the cheaper Roskopf clocks , the clockworks were first purchased, then assembled and assembled into finished clocks. Between 5 and 7 million of these were manufactured and sold annually. Brazil became the most important sales market for the young company. When the Roskopfwerke supplier in question went bankrupt, Mondaine also began manufacturing its own Roskopfwerke from 1980.

The Swiss Railway Clock by Ing. Hans Hilfiker reinvented model Mondaine 30332

Bernheim was a pioneer of quartz watches with digital displays, at least in Switzerland. In 1973 a quartz watch with electronics was developed by Eurosil in Munich and a liquid crystal display (LCD) by Brown, Boveri & Cie (BBC) in Dättwil . This clock with a Twisted Nematic -LC display was one of the first digital clocks of its kind sold in Europe . In 1975 a model followed with a display for 6 digits, which was manufactured in the new LCD factory of BBC in Lenzburg and under the name Digi Stop with stopwatch function was successfully sold. After the price pressure from Far Eastern competitors for such digital watches became too great, Mondaine switched to quartz watches with traditional analog displays.

The largest Swiss retail company Migros began to carry wristwatches in its range. Mondaine developed a wristwatch with a quartz-controlled electronics mechanism in an inexpensive plastic housing for Migros. The watch, which was then launched on February 24, 1983 as M-Watch , was presented to the public before the well-known Swatch and offered at a lower price than the Swatch. The M-Watch was subsequently sold millions of times.

Due to a serious illness in Bernheim, his sons took over the management of the Mondaine watch company. Thanks to an exclusive license from the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), a miniaturized version of the Swiss station clock was made popular as a wristwatch while Bernheim was still alive.

Bernheim was married and had two sons and a daughter.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Peter W. Frey: Watches instead of needles, threads, thimble. In: Tages-Anzeiger . June 19, 2001, p. 14.
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Lucien F. Trueb: Contemporary witnesses of the quartz revolution. 50. Erwin Bernheim. Editions Institut l'Homme et le Temps , La Chaux-de-Fonds 2006, ISBN 978-3-89896-255-1 .
3. ↑ 50 years of Mondaine Watch. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . March 20, 2001, p. 130.