Hanhart: the brand that came out of the stopwatch

Most watch houses added a chronograph to the range at some point. At Hanhart it happened the other way round. Measuring came first, and the wristwatch followed later.

It began in 1882 in Diessenhofen on the Rhine, where Johann Adolf Hanhart advertised his workshop on the first of July. In 1902 the company moved to Schwenningen am Neckar, then the centre of the German watch industry. The real turning point came in 1924. Wilhelm Julius Hanhart, the founder's youngest son, went to a sports meeting and found that stopwatches existed but none a club could afford. What he built in response was the first affordable mechanical stopwatch in the world. It made the company. By 1962, with the Amigo, Hanhart was the largest maker of mechanical stopwatches in Europe.

1938 and the red pusher

Out of stopwatch building came the first wrist chronograph in 1938, the calibre 40 with a single pusher. A year later the calibre 41 and the TachyTele followed. These watches are where the feature you still recognise a Hanhart by first appears: the reset pusher lacquered in red. It was not decoration. A pilot who hits the wrong button in the middle of a measurement loses his calculation. The signal colour was there to prevent exactly that.

Alongside it a second explanation persists in the manufactory. A woman is said to have painted the pusher on her husband's watch with red nail varnish so that he would think of her and come back in one piece. There is no evidence for it. It is told all the same, and that says something about the watches of this house: they are soberly built and still carry stories around with them.

The 417 ES and how Hanhart came to it

In the middle of the fifties the newly formed Bundeswehr was looking for a pilot's chronograph. That Hanhart won the contract had something to do with Glashütte lying behind the Iron Curtain and being unavailable as a supplier. Between 1953 and 1962 around a thousand examples of the 417 ES were made. It became the first watch the German Air Force issued to its pilots, and among collectors it is still known simply as the Bundeswehr chronograph. Originals from that period now change hands well above ten thousand euros. Steve McQueen wore one in the 1962 film The War Lover, which did not quite work historically, because the watch did not yet exist in the Second World War. He owned several Hanharts.

What remains of it today

Production is in Gütenbach in the Black Forest, where a manufactory has stood since 1934. Every movement is checked and regulated there by hand, to a standard the house set itself: zero to plus eight seconds a day, measured across six positions. In the main positions not a single minus second is allowed. A watch that runs fast costs nobody an appointment.

We are an authorised Hanhart dealer. You can try any model in Solingen, we size straps and bracelets before dispatch, and service and overhaul are handled in our own workshop.