The mission of the Musée international d'horlogerie (MIH) is to collect and preserve objects relating to time, its measurement and watchmaking in general. In 1974, when the present building was inaugurated, it already possessed more than 3000 of them, collected initially in the last quarter of the 19th century by the School of Watchmaking, then by the first Watchmaking Museum, founded in 1902. From the outset, the collections came from donations from manufacturers and private individuals, to which were added in the middle of the 20th century major acquisitions, made possible thanks to generous benefactors such as the Office for the Control of Precious Metals or the Syndicat patronal des producteurs de la montre (Employers' Association of Watch Manufacturers).

The current collection, 10'000 items, which is the most significative in the world devoted to the history of time measurement, includes not only watches and clocks from the 16th century to the present day, of Swiss and international manufacture, but also tools, machines, instruments, automata, models or reconstructions of missing objects, as well as paintings, engravings and iconographic collections belonging to the various fields of time measurement.

The museum also preserves an important collection of industrial objects from the regional watchmaking heritage. In addition to the collection and conservation of watchmaking objects such as watches and clocks, the museum is now striving to collect archives and historical documents relating to time, in order to highlight not only the technical history, but also the artistic, social and economic history of watchmaking.

Acquisition policy

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