Gruen Watch Company
watch manufacturer
The Gruen Watch Company was formerly one of the largest watch manufacturers in the United States. It was in business from about 1894 to 1958 and was based in Cincinnati, Ohio. It was founded in 1894 by German-born watchmaker Dietrich Grün, who changed the spelling of his name to "Gruen" because the letter ü does not exist in English.
History
Dietrich Gruen
Dietrich Gruen, was born in Germany in 1847. At 15 years of age, he was sent away from home to become a watchmaker's apprentice. Later he worked for three years in Switzerland before going to the United States. In 1874, he took out a patent for a safety pinion U.S. patent 157,913 for pocket watches, which prevented damage to the watch movement if the watch's mainspring broke.
Columbus Watch Manufacturing Company
In partnership with W.J. Savage, the son of a prominent Columbus, Ohio, watchmaker and businessman, Dietrich Gruen started the Columbus Watch Manufacturing Company in 1876. Initially, the company imported and finished watch movements imported from Madretsch, a suburb of Biel/Bienne, Switzerland. The movements featured Gruen's 1874 safety pinion design.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1550314. VIAF identifies the subject as 144641782. The Library of Congress control number is no2009019268. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1894, 1958, 1847 and 1874.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gruen Watch Company” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.