Johannes Rauschenbach-Vogel was born in Schaffhausen on 27 January 1815, the son of a small grocer in the Vorstadt. After German and Latin schooling he was apprenticed as a mechanic in Zurich and worked as a journeyman in Bern and Dijon before returning home at 25.
In 1841 he opened his first mechanical workshop by the Seidenhof, soon moving it to the Englischer Hof on the Emmersbergstrasse, where he did repairs and made table and decimal scales, oil presses and fruit and oil mills. He married Maria Barbara Vogel in 1844. When Heinrich Moser built the first water works on the Rhine, Rauschenbach moved his workshop there on land Moser made available, the step that turned the craftsman into an industrialist. With his brother Conrad he started a wire-nail and wadding business, which Conrad later took over, while Johannes concentrated on machine tools and, from 1846, threshing machines that competed with English and French imports. In 1867 he bought Moser's factory buildings, and in 1872 he built a foundry.
He was also active in public life, sitting in Schaffhausen's town legislature from 1858 and in the cantonal parliament from 1867 to 1880.
The International Watch Company, founded in Schaffhausen in 1868 by the American engineer F. A. Jones, had gone through two bankruptcies when Rauschenbach, one of its shareholders, bought it on 17 February 1880 for 280,000 francs, saving the business and beginning ownership by four generations of his family. He died on 10 March 1881, and the factory passed to his 25-year-old son, Johannes Rauschenbach-Schenk, who ran it as the Uhrenfabrik von J. Rauschenbach until 1905. Through the Homberger line the family kept control until VDO took over in 1978.
The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland dates IWC's founding to 1869, while IWC and Wikipedia give 1868.