Travel back in time to 1884 and Rome, where Sotirios Bulgaris, a Greek silversmith who had emigrated to Italy, ran a small silversmithing shop. In 1905, he moved his business to the city's prestigious Via Condotti (now the company's flagship store).

In an article published in Swiss daily Le Temps, Pierre-Yves Donzé, a research fellow at Osaka University, demonstrates that the 1975-1985 crisis in the watch industry had nothing to do with the advent of Japanese quartz watches. Rather, since the end of the war, Switzerland had been "resting on its laurels."

Looking for Noon at Five O'Clock, a temporary exhibition at the Musée International d’Horlogerie in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, tells the story of decimal time. Ushered in with the French Revolution, this idiosyncratic system never succeeded in dislodging the sexagesimal system, inherited from the Babylonians, which had been setting the pace of daily life "since the dawn of time."

ETA, Switzerland's largest manufacturer of watch movements, grew slowly out of a succession of takeovers and mergers, although its roots go back to the eighteenth century and the founding of Fabrique d'Horlogerie de Fontainemelon in 1793: Swiss watchmaking's industrial past rolled into one company.

While numerous contemporary watchmakers are leaving their mark, and their name, on horological production, others from the past are proving to have no less of an appeal, even after decades of oblivion when communication plans step in to remind us of the position these firms once occupied, and the heritage they represent.