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| Watches |
Watchmaker’s Renaissance
James D. Malcolmson
01/01/2004
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Ironically, Breguet possesses perhaps the greatest historical heritage in watchmaking. Abraham-Louis Breguet’s technical achievements between 1790 and 1820 were staggering: The tourbillon movement, shock protection, the overcoil balance spring, jumping hour and power reserve indicator, to name but a few, are Breguet inventions that remain staples of the complicated watch today. Additionally, Breguet’s aesthetics—including fluted cases with distinctive numerals, hands and delicately worked guilloché dials—form the basis of a style that remains the most emulated in the watch industry.
 | | Breguet invented the tourbillon movement, here incorporated into the Cassique Grande Complication, in 1795; he applied for a patent in 1801. |
Breguet’s heirs, though talented, did not inherit the full measure of his genius, and the company was unable to exploit the extraordinary reputation the name enjoyed among Europe’s most exclusive clientele. "After Abraham-Louis Breguet’s death in 1823, the quality level began to slowly decline," explains Osvaldo Patrizzi, CEO of Antiquorum Auctioneers, a major venue for fine watch collectors. "There were still good watches made in the 1840s and ’50s, but by the end of the century, the production was very small and unexciting." In fact, the Breguet family sold their interest in the firm in 1870. The new owners, an English family named Brown, ran the company essentially as a retail business with a shop in Paris. The clientele was still exclusive, but outside suppliers in Switzerland, who strayed from the originality of design and technical brilliance that once characterized the brand, performed the principle watchmaking.
Two additional sales—to Parisian jeweler Chaumet in 1970 and to Investcorp, a London-based consortium in 1987—before its final acquisition by the Swatch Group in 1999 further clouded the company’s murky history. Chaumet and Investcorp attempted to revive the look and spirit of the original Breguet, but with mixed success. Despite a renewed commitment to producing high-end complicated watches and investment in redeveloping the firm’s manufacturing capability (an effort bolstered by the use of well-respected movements from Swiss maker Nouvelle Lemania), overall quality continued to falter, and inept distribution and marketing excluded Breguet from the industry’s true top tier.
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