Sponsored: The Man Who Rescued History — Stephen Cox and the Sopwith Foundry

There is a building in Houston, Texas, that does not appear on any industry map of luxury watchmaking. It has no address in the Vallée de Joux. No listing in Glashütte. It is not a manufacture in the Swiss sense — and it is not trying to be. What it contains is something almost entirely without precedent in the world of fine timepieces: a working steel foundry, owned by an independent watch company, staffed by that company’s own people, and dedicated entirely to transforming the recovered steel of World War-era aircraft into watch cases.

This is the Sopwith Foundry. And its founder never intended to build it.

AN UNLIKELY ROUTE TO HOROLOGY

Stephen Cox spent the better part of three decades on television. As a motorsports announcer for NBC, ESPN, Fox Sports, and a co-host of the Mecum Auctions broadcasts that reached millions of collectors annually, he became one of the most recognizable voices in American motorsports. He is also a racing driver, an author, a mountaineer, and a lifelong student of aviation history who has spent years traveling through Europe to document the former airfields of the First World War.

When Cox founded Sopwith Watch Company in Houston in 2022, the concept was already formed: create watches whose cases are manufactured from the authenticated steel of historic aircraft — not watches that include a fragment, not watches that are “inspired by” a legendary airplane, but watches whose cases are that airplane, recast. The watches would carry the motto “The Watch That Was There.” Because each one literally was.

The materials are specific, rare, and finite. Cockpit armor from an original Messerschmitt Bf 109 and a Focke-Wulf Fw 190. Le Rhône 9C engine components from a Thomas-Morse Scout. The engine block of a 1918 Nieuport 28, the first fighter aircraft ever flown by the United States Air Service. Each piece is personally sourced by Cox, carried back to Houston pound by pound, and evaluated before a single watch is planned around it. When a batch of steel is gone, it is gone. There is no mine on earth that produces Messerschmitts. There is no steel mill that makes World War I fighters.

WHEN NO ONE WOULD HELP

The problem Cox encountered when he began designing watches was a practical one with no readily available solution. The quantities of steel he works with are extraordinarily small. A production run of 59 watches does not represent a commercial opportunity for a large industrial foundry. More significantly, the chain of custody — the methodical tracking of exactly which aircraft produced which steel, and which cases that steel became — is not something an outside facility has any incentive to maintain.

The Sopwith Foundry, formally established in Houston in 2024, is the direct result of that challenge. It is among the most unusual facilities in the global watch industry. The work carried out there — disassembling and washing recovered components, silicon blasting each piece, performing laboratory analysis of elemental composition, then melting and enhancing the steel to AMS 5360 aerospace grade — required two years of research and testing before it produced a case that met Sopwith’s standards.

WHAT VERY FEW WATCH COMPANIES DO

To understand why the Sopwith Foundry is exceptional, it helps to understand that the overwhelming majority of watch cases — across nearly every price point, including much of the luxury segment — are manufactured from bulk stainless steel sourced from foundries in China and Southeast Asia. The specific grade most commonly used, 316L, has become a commodity. It is inexpensive, consistent, and entirely interchangeable. The brand that uses it today can substitute another supplier tomorrow without any effect on the finished product.

Even among the smaller group of watchmakers who take case manufacturing more seriously — those who invest in in-house machining, finishing, and case design — the vast majority still begin with the same bulk steel rods and bars everyone else uses, just processed more carefully. The steel itself carries no identity. It could have become anything.

At the Sopwith Foundry, every case begins not with a bar or rod but with a piece of steel still in its original form — still shaped as an engine component, a structural bracket, a section of armored plating. Each piece is laboratory tested to determine its precise elemental composition before any processing begins. The seven distinct steel types within a single 1918 Gnome aviation engine, for instance, must each be analyzed and documented individually before the lot can be prepared for casting. Nothing is automated. Nothing can be.

THE WATCH THAT WAS THERE

The result of this process is something that sits in an entirely different category from even the most distinguished material-story watches in the market today. Meteorite dials, ceramic cases, bronze bezels — these are remarkable materials, but they are materials that can be replicated, replenished, and reordered. The steel in a Sopwith watch case cannot. It is a specific artifact of a specific moment in history, now permanently remade into something that will last another century on the wrist.

Cox is clear about the distinction, and plainly unwilling to soften it.

Current Aero Marquis Collection models include watches made from the steel of the Messerschmitt Bf 109 — the Luftwaffe’s primary single-seat fighter of the Second World War, a machine that flew over the English Channel, North Africa, and the Eastern Front — as well as the Focke-Wulf Fw 190 in multiple configurations and the Nieuport 28, the French biplane fighter flown by American pilots in the skies over the Western Front in the spring and summer of 1918. Each edition is limited not by a marketing decision but by the physical quantity of authenticated steel Cox has recovered. When it is used, it is gone.

There is one final thing Cox says about the watches Sopwith makes — something that sits outside the technical language of metallurgy and watchmaking, but gets perhaps closer to the real point than anything else.

THE AERO MARQUIS COLLECTION — PRE-ORDER NOW

Current editions of the Aero Marquis Collection are available for pre-order. Each edition is strictly limited by the quantity of authenticated historic steel recovered. Ships Spring 2026.

Messerschmitt Bf 109 Pas-de-Calais  $4,600 · Limited to 59 pieces

Focke-Wulf Fw 190 Baltic Winter $4,900 · Limited to 55 pieces

Focke-Wulf Fw 190 Tunisian Desert  $5,700 · Limited to 53 pieces

Focke-Wulf Fw 190 Arctic Sea  $4,900 · Limited to 55 pieces

Nieuport 28 Limited Edition $8,500 · Limited to 98 pieces

Thomas-Morse Scout Limited Edition  $10,500 · Limited to 30 pieces

To learn more, visit Sopwith's online boutique, here.