Now based in Switzerland, the company that makes Rolex watches was founded in which country?

The founder, Hans Wilsdorf, was born in Germany but moved to Switzerland when he was a young man. There he found work at a watch-exporting company in La Chaux-de-Fonds, one of the centers of the Swiss horological industry. He then moved to London, and in 1905 he and a brother-in-law, Alfred Davis, established Wilsdorf & Davis Ltd. to assemble and market watches using works imported from Switzerland. At a time when most men still wore large pocket watches and considered “wristlet” watches—as they were then called—to be slightly effeminate. Wilsdorf came up with the brand name Rolex, registered it as a trademark in 1908, and set out to make wristwatches that were both manly and fashionable.

The company was renamed Rolex Watch Co. Ltd. in 1915, probably because the name Wilsdorf was provoking anti-German prejudice in Great Britain during World War I.

Rolex opened a Geneva office in 1919 and soon afterward moved headquarters to Switzerland and adopted the French-language corporate name of Montres Rolex SA. In 1926 the company introduced the waterproof and airtight "Oyster" model. The "Oyster Perpetual", said to be the first self-winding wristwatch, followed five years later.

Wilsdorf died in 1960, leaving company ownership in the hands of the "Hans Wilsdorf Foundation", a Swiss charitable trust he had set up in 1944.