

Production resumed in the Autumn of 1876 when a new joint stock company was formed and Frederick F. The assets of the company were acquired at auction by the Schaffhausen Handelsbank. Jones returned to America and the remaining assets were auctioned off in 1876

In December 1875 the money finally ran out and the company was declared insolvent. Like many American watch factory founders, Jones underestimated how much money would be needed and the enterprise ran into financial difficulty. To set up a new factory and make watches like this, everything had to be in place before a single watch could be sold the buildings, machinery and staff, which required a large amount of capital. The factory brought together Swiss craftsmanship with the standardised precision of machine tools to increase the accuracy of manufacture and thereby make parts that were interchangeable, which greatly simplified assembly and repair work. Machine tools were imported from USA, or in-house along American lines. Jones established the International Watch Company in 1868. He received a poor reception in the French speaking traditional heart of the Swiss watchmaking industry, in the west part of Switzerland and was attracted to Schaffhausen, far to the north and east, by Henri Moser, a watch maker and watch merchant who had set up a dam across the Rhine in 1866 which provided plenty of power for Jones' proposed factory. Originally from Boston, Massachusetts, Jones was in Switzerland to try to establish a factory using American mass production techniques and Swiss labour, which was cheaper than American labour at the time, to make watches to be exported to America.

The International Watch Company, or IWC, was set up in Schaffhausen in the German-speaking region of north-eastern Switzerland, in 1868 by the American engineer and watchmaker Florentine Ariosto Jones (1841-1916). Because of this connection it is sometimes wrongly assumed that all watches marked S&Co., or even SS&Co., were made by IWC, which is most definitely not true: see IWC and Stauffer for more on this. started to buy watches from IWC in addition to watches from other makers, all of which they had stamped with their trademark S&Co. 189190 Clamshell Waterproof Watchįrom 1894 the London company, Stauffer & Co.

