For centuries, Switzerland has been world-renowned for its watches. This was not always the case: When mechanical timekeeping started back in the 14th century, Switzerland lagged far behind the times.Watchmaking only began in Switzerland after the Huguenot refugees brought the manufacture of portable timepieces to Geneva in the second half of the 16th century. At that time, Geneva, the city of Calvin, was a veritable boom town.In the beginning, watchmaking innovation and production were mainly concentrated in Geneva. This soon spread over the Jura mountains to other regions. In the 17th century, entire families in the canton of Neuchâtel were employed in the watchmaking industry, chiefly making pocket watches and scientific instruments. In the 1800s, Neuchâtel began producing pendulum clocks, which would rival those made in Paris for many decades. By the mid-19th century, watchmaking had spread to the cantons of Solothurn and Bern