Vintage Watches

The beginning of Rado goes far back to 1917 when the brothers Fritz, Ernst and Werner Schlup turned some rooms on their house in Lengnau into a watchmaking workshop. They manufactured watch movements and they would fit out the various movements with dials and hands, case them up and make these available under some name or other.

They offered complete watches from 1954. Their starting point was to make timepieces for a number of clients as private-label manufacturers. In 1956 they started up their own watch brand - "Exacto." But the brand name failed to be fully protected, and issues about rights soon arose. This leads them to create the name "Rado" in 1957, when the first watches bearing Rado name were produced, a relatively young brand compared with other Swiss watches.

The cornerstone for Rado international success laid, however, in 1962 when Rado introduce the first scratch resistant Watch under the name of Diastar. At that time, Rado surprised the world with the revolutionary invention of the oval DiaStar, the first truly scratch-resistant watch ever, sporting a case made of scratchproof heavy metal.

The Rado DiaStar case was manufactured by mixing pure tungsten or titanium carbide powder with a binding agent, subjecting it to pressure equal to 1,000 bar, and sintering it at 1 ,450°C. Rado's home is in Lengnau, Switzerland, and Rado continued to produce only watches with extremely hard cases.

Browse the widest range of vintage Rado watches at the lowest prices.