In 1976 a Swiss house showed a mechanical watch read from the side, through a prism; in 2024 three enthusiasts reclaimed its name and patents and started again.
How it began
Joseph Zwahlen founded AMIDA in Grenchen in 1925. The house adopted new manufacturing methods and pin-lever movements early, and earned a reputation for forward-looking, democratic watchmaking.
AMIDA was both a brand and a movement maker. At its peak it employed just over 300 people, and it later moved to Montreux.
By 1970 it had specialised in jumping hours, with a jumping hour disc and a trailing minutes disc. Its patent, No. 3,685,283, was filed on 13 November 1970. The same number appears on the back of original Digitrend watches.
The prism
A second patent followed on 5 April 1973, for a system AMIDA called the Light Reflecting Display. The movement works horizontally, with flat discs for the hours and minutes. A sapphire prism projects their image vertically, like a submarine periscope for the wrist. There is no luminous or electronic display, and the prism also magnifies the numerals.
At Baselworld in March 1976, in the middle of the quartz revolution, AMIDA introduced the Digitrend. The brand calls it the first mechanical “casquette” driver’s watch. The prism turned the jumping-hour discs through ninety degrees, so the time could be read on the side while driving.
The quartz crisis then froze the house in mid-stride, and AMIDA collapsed in 1979.
The revival
In 2024, after six years of planning, a small crew reclaimed the name and the patents. Matthieu Allègre, Bruno Herbet and Clément Meynier reignited the brand.
The Swiss graphic designer and typographer Johann Terretaz was called in first. Herbet, drawing on his experience as a watch engineer, designed a new jumping-hour module for a Soprod Newton automatic movement. He found the equation for an exact 90-degree reflection. Allègre redesigned the rest of the watch, from the typography, based on the original, to the shape of the case.
The in-house module has nine mechanical components. The car-body case is machined from a block of 316L stainless steel. The case back of the Take Off edition drew on the first AMIDA logo of 1925.
In 2025 the Digitrend Open Sapphire made two-thirds of the case from sapphire grown by the Kyropoulos method. Each piece is shaped and polished for more than twenty hours. The Digitrend NASA Tribute carries the NASA “worm” logotype and a ceramic top shell inspired by the Space Shuttle’s heat tiles.
The house today
Today the company is based in Meyrin, and AMIDA calls itself a creative independent Swiss watchmaker. Its revival team signs its texts as the AMIDA Crew. “We build this watch in small numbers. It is the work of an independent team that wants to resume Amida’s path of bold ideas and clear function.”
The brand describes the long silence after the quartz crisis not as an ending, but as a comma.
At a glance
- Founded: 1925, in Grenchen; revived in 2024
- Founders: Joseph Zwahlen; revived by Matthieu Allègre, Bruno Herbet and Clément Meynier
- Based in: Meyrin, Switzerland
- Known for: The Digitrend of 1976; jumping hours read through a sapphire prism (the Light Reflecting Display)
- Independent: Yes, by its own account (“Creative Independent Swiss Watchmaker”)
Sources: AMIDA’s own website (home page, About, Contact, and the Digitrend Steel, Digitrend Take Off Edition, Digitrend Open Sapphire and Digitrend NASA Tribute pages).