A watch isn’t necessarily something that you think of as being a feat of engineering. But there is far more to a watch than meets the eye. Underneath its face, a vastly complicated machine is silently chugging away. In that way, Patek Philippe are very similar to their products; a simple Swiss brand on the surface, but with a rather more complicated back-story. The watchmakers appear, on initial inspection, to be a resolutely Swiss brand. They certainly sound it. But there is far more to the watchmaker’s origins.
In the early 1830s a Polish soldier named Antoni Patek arrived in Geneva, two years after leading an evacuation from Poland following a failed uprising against the Russian forces who, at that time, were occupying the country. Patek quickly became enthralled by the watchmaking heritage of the city, and learnt about both painting and engraving from the artist Alexandre Calame.
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