Florentine Ariosto Jones (1841–1916) was an American engineer and watchmaker who had been a director of E. Howard & Co. in Boston. In 1868 he founded the International Watch Company in Switzerland, planning to combine the low wages and skilled home-based labour of Swiss watchmaking with American factory methods and to export the finished watches to the United States.
His plan to open a factory met resistance in French-speaking Switzerland, but in Le Locle he met Heinrich Moser, the Schaffhausen industrialist who had built the town's first hydroelectric plant on the Rhine. Moser saw the venture as a chance to industrialise his town, and together they founded what became the only watch manufacturer in north-eastern Switzerland. In 1869 Jones rented premises in a Moser building on the Rheinstrasse; a purpose-built factory designed by the Schaffhausen architect G. Meyer was completed in 1875, with 196 workers and room for 300.
Tariffs, financing problems and machinery failures made it hard to sell the watches in America, and by 1875 shareholders said the company was close to collapse. It went bankrupt and Jones lost control; the business passed in 1880 to the Rauschenbach family. His name survives on IWC's Portuguese F.A. Jones pocket-watch models.