Erhard Junghans

Erhard Junghans founded a clock-component and later clock-manufacturing business in Schramberg in the Black Forest region in 1861, initially supplying parts to the region's many small traditional Black Forest clockmaking workshops before expanding into full clock manufacture, applying increasingly mechanised, factory-scale production methods influenced by the American system of interchangeable-parts manufacture that Junghans had studied.

Under Erhard Junghans and, after his early death, his sons, the firm grew into one of the largest clock manufacturers in the world by the later nineteenth century, helping transform the fragmented Black Forest cottage-industry clock trade into a consolidated industrial sector and shifting Germany's position in the international clock trade from a supplier of comparatively simple wooden-movement clocks toward mass-produced metal-movement clocks and, later, precision instruments and watches.

Because Erhard Junghans himself died relatively young, much of the firm's later fame (including its twentieth-century watch production) postdates his own direct involvement, and biographical material specifically about him, as distinct from the corporate history of the Junghans company, is comparatively limited in general reference sources.