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Breguet: the story continues…
As a brand that represents a great historical and cultural heritage as well as avant-garde technology, Breguet has always had a fascinating ability to innovate. It owes its place in European cultural history to its prodigiously inventive founder, Abraham-Louis Breguet (1747-1823), and its position as a benchmark of Fine Watchmaking to its astonishingly skillful master watchmakers of today.
The crucial inventions of A.-L. Breguet
Born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, in 1747, Abraham-Louis Breguet spent much of his life in Paris where many of his important creations were produced. He worked simultaneously in all the areas of watchmaking, beginning his career with a series of masterly inventions: the automatic watch, referred to as “a perpetual”, the gong spring for repeater watches, and the first shock-absorber device, the “pare-chute”.
The Breguet style
Breguet watches are unmistakable for their perfectly rational styling where lines are clean and functions clear. To create the style that time cannot age, A.-L. Breguet turned to the classical rules of proportion and order. As in all precious objects, it is the sum of detail that gives a watch its particular presence. Today Breguet watches carry the pedigree of an original design in sharp, blued-steel hands and the crisp engine-turning of the dial.
Distinguished Breguet’s patrons
The great and the good of every age have recognised in a Breguet watch expressions of high human ideals – creativeness, beauty, impartiality. The watch owned by the world’s most prominent individuals holds equal fascination for their literary contemporaries.
For the most fashionable writers of every era, it’s a Breguet, rather than a watch, that comes into the story. The firm’s famed archives record every Breguet watch sold since 1787. For its advertising campaign, Breguet selected a few of their owners who warrant the attention of history.
The Tourbillon, a Breguet Masterpiece
On June 26, 1801, Abraham-Louis Breguet earned the rights for a patent which would last for a ten year period for a new type of regulator called the “Tourbillon”. At a time when timepieces were worn vertically on the body, he took great pains to devise a way of negating the effects of the earth’s attraction on the functioning of the oscillator and, on the basis of this, improving the chronometric accuracy of the movement. More than 220 years after its invention, the tourbillon is still generating as much fascination as it did then and remains, now more than ever, Breguet’s main prerogative.
Find out more about the brand: https://www.breguet.com/en