Breguet history

The name of Breguet, one of the highest possible references among watchmaking craftsmen, is part of our cultural heritage.

Abraham-Louis Breguet was responsible for many pioneering discoveries. Here are just two of the milestones in horological history: In 1780, the young Breguet improved the automatic movement and made the first self-winding watch, "Perpetuelle" with an oscillating weight and two going barrels. Since then has been regarded as the father of modern-day watchmaking.

The Tourbillon rotating dolly, invented by Breguet around 1795 and patented in 1801, eliminated the effect of gravity on the precision of clocks and is still used in exclusive timepieces today. Since 1787 each Breguet watch is recorded with the name of the individual maker, the cost price, sale date and identity of the purchaser.

The trademarks of Breguet watches are their blued steel hands with tips in the form of a hollowed-out apple and the fine guilloching of the face.

Both Napoléon and Wellington were consulting their Breguets at Waterloo!

Other famous wearers include Dumas' Count of Monte Cristo, Phileas Fogg, the time conscious hero of Jules Verne's Around the world in Eighty Days.

Today, high quality, engine-tuned by hand watches, often extra-flat, each with a unique production number.

It is by demonstrating its skills in fine and complicated watchmaking that Breguet keeps alive its cultural heritage in a modern and innovative way.

Watch brands might research their past and write their history, but Breguet alone draws a thread through the very fabric of European art and culture. By producing watchmaking's most important historical treasures, it has earned a pedigree that is the envy of the industry. Even the most distinguished of Breguet's competitors acknowledge the overwhelming contribution of its inventions to the past 200 years of fine horology.

Today, as part of the Swatch Group, Breguet has unprecedented resources with which to fulfil its watchmaking destiny.