The History of Glycine

Glycine starts the way most lasting watch companies do—without spectacle, without headlines, just a decision made in a small workshop that would only matter years later; in 1914, in Bienne, Eugène Meylan chose to focus on wristwatches at a time when most people still trusted pocket watches more, and inside that early space the work was steady and unglamorous, movements assembled piece by piece, then taken apart, corrected, and assembled again until they held time properly, because back then a watch didn’t earn its reputation when it left the bench—it earned it months later, on someone else’s wrist, somewhere far from where it was made.

Through the 1920s and 1930s, as the wristwatch stopped being a novelty and became something people relied on, Glycine grew the same way it started—carefully; they refined hand-wound movements, moved into automatic calibers as the technology matured, and built a catalog that covered what people actually needed: simple dress watches, durable everyday pieces, and more robust designs that could handle real use, and while production expanded beyond Switzerland into broader markets, the work inside Bienne didn’t suddenly become impersonal, it stayed hands-on, watchmakers working in sequence, adjusting rates, correcting tiny inconsistencies, doing the kind of work that doesn’t show up in advertising but shows up years later when a watch is still keeping time.

By the early 1950s, the problem wasn’t whether a watch could keep time—it was whether it could keep up with how people were using it; aviation had changed everything, and suddenly time wasn’t local anymore, it stretched across routes and borders, and in 1953 Glycine answered that shift with the Airman, one of the earliest watches built specifically for pilots dealing with multiple time zones, and the design wasn’t complicated for the sake of it, it was practical: a 24-hour dial that made one full rotation per day, so there was no confusion between morning and night, paired with a rotating 24-hour bezel to track a second time zone, and secured with a locking mechanism through a second crown so it wouldn’t move once set, a small detail that says a lot about how they approached the problem.

Put that watch where it was meant to be used and it makes even more sense—a pilot mid-flight, somewhere between departure and destination, glancing down not out of habit but necessity, checking time across locations without having to think it through, and that clarity is what made the Airman stick; it found its way onto the wrists of U.S. Air Force personnel during the Cold War, saw use in Vietnam, and built its reputation the only way that really lasts—by doing its job when it needed to, without drawing attention to itself, and while later versions added GMT functionality and refinements, the core idea never changed.

At the same time, Glycine didn’t narrow into a one-model brand; through the 1950s and 1960s, they continued producing a full range of watches—dive models as underwater exploration grew, field watches built for legibility and durability, and classic dress pieces that carried forward their earlier work—while refining automatic movements and scaling production, and inside the workshop the process stayed consistent: assemble, regulate, test, repeat, the kind of rhythm that doesn’t change much even when the world outside does.

The 1970s forced that outside world into the workshop whether anyone wanted it or not; the quartz crisis reshaped the entire industry, and suddenly accuracy could be mass-produced at a lower cost, pushing many traditional manufacturers out entirely, and Glycine did what it had to do—they introduced quartz models to stay competitive while continuing mechanical production for those who still valued it, not a dramatic reinvention, just a practical adjustment that kept the company moving forward without losing its footing.

Through the following decades, Glycine remained steady rather than dominant, continuing the Airman in multiple variations while maintaining broader collections across pilot, sport, and dress categories, and in 2016 the company was acquired by Invicta Watch Group, which expanded its reach, particularly in the U.S., while keeping its core models in production, including the Airman, which remains one of the longest continuously produced pilot watch designs still available.

If you follow Glycine all the way through—from that first workshop in Bienne, through the Airman years, through the quartz shift, and into its modern chapter—you don’t end up with a single defining moment, you end up with a pattern; different decades, different pressures, different ownership, but the same job being done over and over again: build something that keeps time the way it’s supposed to, and let the person wearing it get on with everything else, which, in the end, is about as close as a watchmaker gets to doing their job right.