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Joël Pynson
December 2025
1. Creation in La Chaux-de-Fonds
Jean Hunsperger founded his company in La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1933, but did not register it in the commercial register until 1936 [1].
The company had modest beginnings, with just three employees, but grew rapidly and already had 15 employees by 1937 [2].
The Teriam trademark was registered in 1940.
In 1943, Jean Hunsperger went into partnership with Louis Bourquin and the company became Hunsperger & Cie [3].
1947
In 1950, there were 45 employees producing nearly 200,000 watches, mainly for the Italian market [4].
From the 1950s onwards, while continuing to produce watches under the Teriam brand, the factory increasingly focused on private labels, supplying watches to distributors and wholesalers. Unusually, it also assembled movements for Ébauches SA [4].
In 1954, the company became Hunsperger et Cie, Montres Teriam, and Jean's son, André Hunsperger, joined the business [5].
2. Montres Teriam
Teriam offers a wide range of watches, based on the different calibers available from Ébauches SA: men's, women's, automatic, alarm, etc.
1958
1958
1959
1959
1960
1960
1962
Two Teriam models created during this period are of particular interest:
- the "living watch"
This watch, launched in 1959, features a moving disc around the edge of the dial that rotates like the second hand, causing light to play on small transparent beads.
It is typical of the vogue for watches with optical effects that followed the launch of Ernest Borel's Cocktail model in 1953.
The "living watch" also existed in a "mysterious" version with transparent discs replacing the hour and minute hands.
- Jump
It is a beautiful diving watch, launched in 1960, which Teriam had tested not by divers but by French parachutists.
In 1969, the company became Montres Teriam SA [6].
In 1970, Teriam inaugurated new, modern premises in La Chaux-de-Fonds. It now had assembly lines capable of producing one million watches per year. The factory employed 145 people at that time.
With strong competition from Roskopf's low-cost watches, André Hunsperger joined UMES, the union for low-cost anchor watches, in Neuchâtel in 1971 [7].
In 1980, Teriam produced more than 4.2 million watches and movements. This was the company's peak. Even though 15% of the calibers used in 1982 were quartz, it was difficult to compete with the cheap quartz calibers from Asia. In addition, in 1986, ETA discontinued the two calibers that were produced by Teriam, leading to the layoff of 26 employees [8].
The following year, Teriam had to close a workshop and lay off eight more employees [9].
Jean Hunsperger died in 1989, and the company he founded disappeared four years later [10].
[1] FOSC 1936
[2] La Suisse Horlogère, édition hebdomadaire, 1970, 9, p. 304
[3] FOSC 1943
[4] La Suisse Horlogère, 1982, 4, pp. 36-37
[5] FOSC 1954
[6] FOSC 1969
[7] FOSC 1971
|8] La Fédération Horlogère, 1986, 16, p. 14
[9] La Fédération Horlogère, 1987, 10, p. 15
[10] FOSC 1993
The FOSC (Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce) is available on E-periodica
Notes:
About Time To Tell: Time To Tell has one of the largest private digitized databases on the history of Swiss watchmaking, with over 2.5 TB of data on more than 1,000 Swiss watch manufacturers. This database has been built up over a period of around 30 years and continues to be updated with around 50 to 100 GB of data each year. The database consists of old documents, mainly Swiss trade journals, dating from the late 19th century to the late 20th century. Most of these documents are not available on the Internet. The historical articles published on the time2tell.com website always cite the sources used.
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