Guido Panerai founds in 1860 in Florence the company Guido Panerai & Figlio. The family enterprise for precision engineering, later renamed to Officine Panerai, is initially concerned with the production of nautical precision instruments, but over the years also develops numerous patents in the area of optics and watches. From 1913 many kinds of equipment for the Royal Italian Navy are manufactured, including night aiming devices, time bombs, depth gauges and mechanical calculators. Due to an important invention of Guido Panerai, which is patented in 1915, the instruments can be read even in complete darkness. It is the luminous substance “Radiomir”.