Vintage Timex Watches
Honest vintage Timex: Marlins, electrics, early digitals, and the everyday watches that earned the licking-and-ticking reputation. Each one is photographed individually and sold exactly as shown. They are affordable, they are one of a kind, and they move fast.
Read the detailed Timex history3 Timex timepieces in stock
The Timex Story
A one-dollar pocket watch built the company behind Timex. Waterbury Clock Company, started in 1854, made it as the Yankee of 1896 for the New York merchant Robert Ingersoll, who sold millions. The 1933 Mickey Mouse watch reportedly sold 11,000 at Macy's in one day and carried the near-bankrupt firm through the Depression.
Two Norwegians, shipowner Thomas Olsen and engineer Joakim Lehmkuhl, fled the German invasion of April 1940 and bought control of Waterbury Clock in 1941. They renamed it United States Time Corporation in 1944 and launched Timex wristwatches in 1950, kept cheap by Armalloy, a wartime alloy that replaced jewel bearings. From 1956 the newscaster John Cameron Swayze hosted TV torture tests, some live, one on a cliff diver at Acapulco, to show a Timex takes a licking and keeps on ticking. By 1962 one in three watches sold in America was a Timex.
Cheap digitals broke that lead. Texas Instruments sold a $10 watch by 1977, and the Timex payroll shrank from about 30,000 to 6,000 as factories closed. In 1980 Fred Olsen, Thomas's son, fired chief executive Robert Weltzien and took over himself. A $34.95 sports digital saved it. The 1984 Triathlon sold 400,000 in a year, became the Ironman in 1986, and by Timex's own count was America's best-selling watch through 1997. The Indiglo backlight came in 1992, and Bill Clinton wore an Ironman as president.
In 2020 the Boston investment firm Baupost Group bought a majority stake in the brand's parent, Timex Group, ending nearly eighty years of Olsen family control. The group moved its headquarters from Middlebury to Shelton, Connecticut, in 2025. It makes Guess and Versace watches, in 2025 launched Timex Atelier, Swiss-movement automatics priced from $950, and in July 2026 completed its purchase of the Swedish brand Daniel Wellington. Its 170th anniversary brought 1,000 Waterbury watches at one dollar in November 2024, and its 2017 Marlin and 2019 Q Timex reissues are remakes of originals like those listed here.