Josef Benedikt Pallweber was born on February 7, 1858, in Schörfling am Attersee bei Vöcklabruck, a village between Salzburg and Linz, in Austria. Pallweber was the son of the local locismith. As a young man, Josef spent time in Switzerland, studying the watchmaking trade, but returned to Austria around 1880. Until 1886, he worked as a watchmaker in Salzberg, becoming known for his patent from 1883 for the jump number watch, which was the first digital watch in the world. The watch was patented in Germany and Great Britain in 1883, and in the United States in 1885. Pallweber granted licenses to IWC Schaffhausen and Cortébert Watch, among others, which produced many jump watches between 1885 and 1910. For example, IWC produced 20,000 watches alone. The name “Pallweber watch” became a synonym for jump number watches.
Jump number watches had digits on dials and switched quickly to a new digit at the minute or hour change (in other words, “jumping”), with the relevant digits visible through windows in the face, rather than having digits that gradually advanced during the course of the time lapse. The jump effect actually involved complex mechanical works to achieve.
In 1886, Pallweber moved to Mannheim, Germany, where he married Lina Mack. From the mid-1890s until 1902, Pallweber worked at the Frankfurter Fabrik Mechanischer Apparate in Frankfurt, Germany. There he worked on the construction of a “clock with convertible digits,” a cash register/adding machine (U.S. Patent Nos. 630,922 and 648,126), and a printing full-keyboard adding machine (German Patent No. 131337).
In 1903, Pallweber and colleague Adolf Hermann Bordt formed the Adix Company Pallweber & Bordt in Mannheim, for the production of calculating machines. Bordt was an owner of a business that sold office machines and furniture. The sole shareholders were Pallweber and Bordt. Pallweber left the company after five years. Adix developed an adding machine known as the “Adix adder,” which was a click wheel column adder with nine keys. The key selling point of the Adix adder was that it was noiseless, but its practicality was limited because it could not exceed totals of 999. Eventually, the Adix company would produce the Kuli, which would display a total sum up to a 12-digit result, and which could also perform multiplication with up to 5-digit numbers.
After leaving Adix, Pallweber established a company for technical inventions and patented an “alarm device for portable cassettes and similar containers.” By 1911, his patents shifted focus to alarmed portable cash boxes.
Pallweber died in 1921 in Mannheim.