In the 1950s Hans-Ulrich Klingenberg set out to produce watches of timeless beauty and impeccable quality. One of his early breakthroughs was developing and patenting a vacuum system in a monolithic watch case, giving complete resistance to water, air, humidity and dust — the greatest enemies of mechanical movements — a technology he then commercialised for other watch brands.

His conviction was that excellence lay in the choice of enduring materials, and after extensive testing one stood out: sapphire. Scoring 9 on the Mohs scale and virtually scratch-proof, it offered the shapes, cuts and colours of a jewellery gem, and it became the cornerstone of his designs. After crafting watches for renowned Swiss brands, he founded his own company in 1966 — CENTURY TIME GEMS LTD — and brought his own watches to market, defining the material as CENTURY sapphire. In 1979 he invented the Megalith system, fusing two sapphire discs into a single inseparable entity to form the case.

Philip W.A. Klingenberg, son of the founder, joined in 1993 and positioned the brand in a modern, luxurious and romantic register; the company moved to a new building in Nidau in 1995 and opened the first dedicated CENTURY boutique in Tokyo's Ginza district in 2000. The most iconic creation is the Wings of Time, a pendant piece in which passing time becomes a bird taking flight each time the watch is viewed. The collection today runs to hand-cut sapphire cases in new shapes and refined cuts, deep black PVD models, skeletonised dials and certified chronometers, all produced in the Nidau workshops where every CENTURY watch is born.