Helmut Sinn - History of the German watchmaking legend

Helmut Sinn (* 3 September 1916 in Metz , Lorraine ; † 14 February 2018 in Frankfurt am Main) Helmut Sinn (Helmut Sinn) was a German pilot, instrument and aerobatics instructor , aviation expert, and entrepreneur . In 1961, Sinn founded a watch company in Frankfurt am Main under his own name, selling self-designed wristwatches , primarily mechanical chronographs . He sold the company , Helmut Sinn Spezialuhren, in 1994 and acquired the Swiss watch manufacturer Guinand in 1995. Sinn was considered an exceptional figure in the watch industry and remained entrepreneurial and inventive well into old age. He was also known as "Fast Helmut."

Sinn, born in 1916, came to the Palatinate with his family as a refugee in 1918. Due to the nearby Speyer airfield, Sinn developed a fascination for airplanes as a child. This led him to want to be a pilot at the early age of six ^{[ 2 ]} and, according to his own account, he was laughed at for it. ^{[ 3 ]}

At 18, he joined the Reich Labor Service and learned to fly gliders . He also flew the famous "Skull Splitter," the Grunau 9 training glider, at the Wasserkuppe mountain in the Rhön region . Afterwards, Sinn joined the Luftwaffe and earned all his pilot's licenses between 1936 and 1938. He was drafted into military service and served in a reconnaissance squadron . He said the following about this time:

The crash occurred over Soviet territory. He suffered severe back injuries and lost both little fingers. Despite this, he subsequently worked as a flight instructor, primarily on the Heinkel He 70 , Ju 52, and Ju 88. After the war, Sinn was a prisoner of war in one of the so-called Rhine meadow camps of the Allies and was released in 1945 with tuberculosis .

After the war, the passionate pilot was no longer allowed to fly due to a flight ban imposed by the Allies, and health reasons further complicate matters. Sinn sought a profession. He acquired cuckoo clocks in the Black Forest and sold them at a profit to Americans. With the profits from his clock sales, he set up his first clockmaking workshop. By the late 1940s, he had established his own watch business in Frankfurt am Main. He manufactured functional watches ( operational watches ) for pilots and flight instructors and delivered them directly to the customer. His marketing strategy was "As good as possible and at the same time as inexpensive." Helmut Sinn later explained that his choice of the watch industry also stemmed from purely pragmatic considerations: "I didn't have a profession. I was looking for something that didn't require much space or materials."

In Frankfurt in the 1950s, he also began developing and manufacturing aircraft clocks for the German Federal Armed Forces . His company had won a tender against the established watch manufacturer Junghans . Sinn clocks were used in aircraft such as the Bell UH-1D , Alpha Jet , F-104G Starfighter , F-4E Phantom , MRCA Tornado , and later the Eurofighter . International civilian airlines also soon became interested in Sinn clocks. In the 1970s, Lufthansa 's Boeing 707 , 727 , and 737 aircraft were equipped with Sinn onboard clocks. According to Helmut Sinn, 600 of the on-board clocks he produced were installed in Lufthansa cockpits.

In 1956, Helmut Sinn began developing his first pilot's chronograph , a wristwatch with a stopwatch function. The design was deliberately strongly based on aircraft cockpit clocks. For these watches, he developed design guidelines that primarily focused on high functionality, optimal legibility, and superior quality.

In 1961, he founded the watch manufactory Helmut Sinn Spezialuhren (today: Sinn Spezialuhren ) in Frankfurt-Rödelheim , which initially continued to produce its own functional watches for pilots and flight instructors. Sinn invented numerous technical innovations for his self-designed mechanical wristwatches. Later, the company primarily produced high-quality chronographs, which were sold under the brands Sinn Spezialuhren and Chronosport through direct sales to end customers – an unusual practice at the time, bypassing intermediaries. This allowed Sinn to offer customer-friendly pricing, as the retailer's markup was eliminated.

In 1985, German astronaut Reinhard Furrer wore a Sinn "142 S" on his wrist during the Spacelab mission STS-61-A , thus bringing an automatic chronograph into space. German astronauts Reinhold Ewald and Klaus-Dietrich Flade also wore Sinn watches during the other two Spacelab missions.

Sinn sold the company, including the trademark rights , to Lothar Schmidt, an engineer and long-time senior IWC employee, in 1994. In 2012, he told the FAZ : "I thought I could still continue working there." However, this led to a dispute. Helmut Sinn took legal action and lost, which embittered him for a long time. ^{[ 6 ]} At the end of 2012, he also stated in an interview that he had lost "all his money" in this legal battle, which involved several different court cases, and had even had to take out a loan. ^{[ 7 ]} The publicly available statements of Schmidt and Sinn contradict each other on key points of the legal dispute at that time.