La Chaux-de-Fonds / Le Locle, Watchmaking Town Planning
The number of Wikipedia languages with an article is our measure of how widely known a site is. Counts of visitors and wishes will appear once enough people use the app.
How it came to be
La Chaux-de-Fonds and Le Locle are neighbouring towns at about 1,000 m in the Swiss Jura, on land too short of water for good farming. In the 17th century the watchmaker Daniel Jeanrichard had local farmers make watch parts during the long winters, and the craft took root in Le Locle.
The Le Locle area had about 77 watchmakers in 1750 and more than 800 by 1800. La Chaux-de-Fonds burned in 1794, and Le Locle in 1683, 1765 and 1833. In 1835 Charles-Henri Junod drew a grid plan for La Chaux-de-Fonds, lining parallel strips with buildings that combined homes and workshops.
In the 1870s factory-made American watches pushed the towns into crisis, and from the 1880s production moved into factories. Karl Marx called La Chaux-de-Fonds a huge factory-town in Das Kapital. UNESCO listed the two towns in 2009.
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons, under each photo’s license. Prototype; may contain errors. We measure usage anonymously to improve the app (PostHog, EU).