Timex Watches

The most famous of all wristwatch brands is Timex, the brand that "takes a licking and keeps on ticking." When the U.S. Time Company, whose roots date from the 1850s, introduced the Timex in 1950, it revolutionized the time-keeping industry. The wristwatches allowed people to easily tell the time. They were also simply designed, inexpensive, and durable. These improvements played into what was to become one of the most celebrated TV advertising campaigns of all time.

Timex wristwatches first were promoted in print. Such ads depicted the timepieces attached to the bat of baseball (see entry under 1900s—Sports and Games in volume 1) legend Mickey Mantle (1931–1995), affixed to a turtle and to a lobster's claw, frozen in an ice cube, and twirling inside a vacuum cleaner. Then in the mid-1950s, John Cameron Swayze (1906–1995), a veteran newscaster, began presiding over a series of television (see entry under 1940s—TV and Radio in volume 3) commercials in which the wristwatch was subjected to intricate torture tests. A Timex might be crushed by a jack-hammer, tossed about in a dishwasher, or strapped to a diver who plunged off a cliff. After this mistreatment, Swayze held the still-operating wristwatch up to the camera. He then declared that it "takes a licking and keeps on ticking"—a catch-phrase that entered the pop-culture vocabulary. The success of the ads resulted in Timex wristwatch sales surpassing the five million mark by 1958. By the end of the decade, one in every three wristwatches sold in the United States was a Timex.

Across the decades, thousands of viewers wrote the company, proposing scenarios for future torture tests. The ad campaign ended in 1977, with a "failure" that had been planned in advance. In the commercial, an elephant stomped on—and completely crushed—a Timex, at which point Swayze informed the television audience, "It worked in rehearsal."

—Rob Edelman

For More Information

McDermott, Kathleen. Timex: A Company and Its Community,1854–1998. Middlebury, CT: Timex Corporation, 1998.

Timex Corp. "Our Company History." Timex.http://www.timex.com/html/our_company_history.html (accessed February 26, 2002).