Movements in time
A pillar of Swiss watchmaking, Jaeger-LeCoultre has several watch patents to its credit. No wonder then that the name has become an enduring point of reference in the watch world. Time N Style dips into the history of this brand to see what makes it tick.

The personalised engraving on the caseback of the Reverso Lady makes it unique.

A road less travelled
Caught between a polar landscape and an icy blue sky, lies a valley in the Jura hills of Switzerland, which goes by the name of Vallée de Joux. The valley, with its twin lakes bounded by forested hills, nestles within itself the village of Le Sentier, which faced its infamous harsh and persistent winters year after year after year. The year 1803 was no different. Except that it was marked by the birth of a boy who would give the name of LeCoultre international renown.

Many people, today, recognise the valley as being home to the world's best watchmakers. Among them was the LeCoultre family, which made a name for itself through unrelenting industry and constant invention. It all began in the year 1833, when 30-year-old Antoine LeCoultre founded a company, which manufactured watch gearing, with his brother Ulysse in their native village. Antoine had completed his apprenticeship and specialisation in metallurgy and gear mechanisms in the family workshop, which produced mechanical instruments. But he eventually made the decision to leave the family business and invest his energy and engineering talent in the development of new production processes and methods.

A treasure trove of ideas
A source of new ideas and innovations, the enterprise grew to the extent that, by 1860, it had employed almost a hundred people. By 1890, it had produced a range of 125 different movements. Until then, the French and the British were considered the leading watch manufacturers of the world. It helped that both were seafaring nations with merchant fleets and navies that needed precise timekeeping to navigate the globe. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the Swiss, who began turning out high value watches in greater quantities, undermined this dominance. Antoine LeCoultre, especially, designed and built machine tools that could produce watch parts to unprecedented levels of precision. One of them was the Millionometer in 1844, which established the metric system as the watch industry measurement standard. The Millionometer is an instrument with which measurements of up to one thousandths of a millimetre can be made accurately.

Worthy successors
Luckily, Antoine's successors inherited his pioneering spirit. His sons, Elie, Paul and Benjamin, followed him in the business. And LeCoultre became an early source of complicated movements, creating repeaters, chronographs and calendars. The year 1847 saw the production of the first movement with a crown winding system that also set the time, eventually rendering keys unnecessary for winding watches. A mere four years later, at the first Universal Exhibition in London, Antoine won the gold medal for creating a gold chronometer with the new keyless winding and setting system.

In 1899, when Elie's son Jacques-David joined the business, LeCoultre had already become Vallée de Joux's leading manufacturer. But in 1903, Jacques-David entered into a business relationship in Paris with Edmond Jaeger, who was the exclusive supplier of watch movements to Cartier. However, the new partnership of Jaeger-LeCoultre remained faithful to Antoine's pioneering spirit. The merger prompted further technical innovations - from a stainless steel case to the smallest mechanical movement in the world, which weighed less than a gram.

LeCoultre movements were held in such high regard that up until 1910, the company provided Patek Philippe with most of its raw movements. Even other companies came to rely on LeCoultre's products. From these they could then create finished watches. In fact, the company's success was so immense that in the period between 1900 and 1919, forty thousand raw movements were produced. These were sold for anything between 100 and 400 francs each, not an insignificant amount in those times. Going back to 1903, when the Jaeger-LeCoultre merger came about, LeCoultre & Co unveiled the world's flattest pocket watch calibre. At a thickness of 1.38 mm, it still remains an unbroken record.

Next Page