Dubey & Schaldenbrand
Founded in 1946 by Georges Dubey — master watchmaker and prominent professor at the famous La Chaux-de-Fonds watchmaking school, the Technicum — and René Schaldenbrand, an equally experienced Swiss watchmaker. Together they patented the Index Mobile, a pioneering split-seconds flyback chronograph mechanism registered internationally in the 1940s, using a coil spring connecting two overlapping seconds hands to allow one to freeze and catch up to the other up to 59 seconds later. They shaped the split-seconds complication as we know it. The company became dormant, then was revived in 1995 by Cinette Robert using a movement collection she had accumulated during the 1970s–1980s, recasing vintage movements to match their era.
The brand is known for its Art Deco / Jugendstil-inspired Arabic numeral typography, distinctive cushion and rectangular cases, and the Diplomatique collection. Designs appeal to collectors who appreciate that rare 'Deco-glamour-meets-watchmaking-nerd' aesthetic. The brand is now largely dormant with most stock trading on the secondary market — but for collectors, it offers some of the best sleeper value in independent Swiss horology.
The Index Mobile deserves its place in the technical canon precisely because of its economy. Where a conventional rattrapante buries a complex clutch-and-column mechanism under the dial, Dubey's solution runs a second coaxial shaft up through the centre of the watch, its split hand held directly beneath the main chronograph hand by nothing more than a finely coiled spring visible on the dial; press the button set into the centre of the crown and the upper hand freezes while the lower runs on — release, and the spring snaps them back together instantly. The reissued Index Mobiles built from Cinette Robert's hoard use hand-wound Landeron bases beating at a stately 18,000 vph in 37.5 mm cases, in steel, gold plate, and solid gold with silver, gilt, or black dials. Robert herself — born into a watchmaking family and sometimes called the first lady of the Swiss watch industry — had spent the 1970s and early 1980s touring manufacturers to buy up movements and components when almost no one else saw their worth, and her revival produced the models that define the modern brand: the Aerodyn with its oversized Arabic numerals curving to follow the case, the dual-time Aerodyn Duo, the Carre Cambre, and the Roaring-Twenties tonneau Spiral and Gran'Chrono lines. In 2009 Jonatan Gil, after two years working alongside Robert, purchased the company to carry it forward. Collectors who find the watches today discover hand-wound chronographs finished like top-tier Valjoux restorations — because in essence that is what they are — wearing vintage-Franck-Muller glamour at a fraction of the fashionable names' prices.