A world tour of watches: a new collection from one of timekeeping's greatest icons

France’s regicide revolutionaries wanted to efface every sign of the Ancien Régime, including timekeeping, which went decimal: 10-day weeks, 10-hour days, hours of 100 minutes. It only lasted for an undecimal 12 years, so you can be forgiven for not recognising the date ‘7 Messidor, Year 9’ until it is translated into Gregorian – when it becomes 26 June 1801, a date that is, or should be, engraved into the minds of all watch lovers. On that date, Abraham-Louis Breguet was granted a patent for a device he called the tourbillon and watchmaking has never quite been the same since.

You cannot repeal the laws of physics. But you can, if you are Breguet, be clever about circumventing them. Gravity pulls unevenly on a balance-spring held vertically, as a pocket watch invariably was, distorting its oscillations and gradually impairing its precision. His solution was to place the entire escapement inside a rotating cage making one complete revolution per minute, averaging out the gravitational effect.

This year, Breguet is celebrating the 225th anniversary of the patent with a collection of new watches that will travel the globe. This world tour was the idea of Gregory Kissling, CEO of Montres Breguet. ‘Nobody needs this,’ he says of the new collection, with the calm confidence of a man who knows that need is entirely beside the point. ‘This is a work of art,’ he enthuses.

Kissling feels that, as the tourbillon’s inventor, the Breguet brand has a duty to honour its founder’s most famous creation. Thus, modern Breguet has eight different tourbillon calibres and, for the 225th anniversary, five new watches draw on that extraordinary repertoire.

The Marine Tourbillon Équation Marchante 5887, the most complex watch in the collection, combines tourbillon, perpetual calendar and running equation of time in a 43.9 mm platinum case. Its extraordinary dial carries a phosphorescent miniature painting of the Paris sky at midnight on 26 June 1801.

In contrast, the 35mm Classique Tourbillon 7357, is a far less busy homage to Breguet’s Ref 3350, the first tourbillon wristwatch produced by modern-era Breguet in 1988 – important because it propelled the watchmaker into the premier league, where Kissling would like to see the brand return. In a nice touch, its new calibre, the 187B, preserves the historic frequency of 18,000 vibrations per hour that Breguet himself used.

Moving at a rather more rapid 10 Hz, the Expérimentale 1 provides a glimpse of what Breguet might have achieved with 21st-century methods and materials. Its four-minute tourbillon running at 10 Hz with a constant-force magnetic escapement is certified to within one second per day.

If you are already perplexed by the workings of the tourbillon, then prepare to be baffled by the Classique Tourbillon Sidéral 7255, Breguet’s first-ever flying tourbillon wristwatch. This first is further enhanced with what the manufacture calls a ‘mysterious’ construction putting the tourbillon into motion without it being visibly connected to the rest of the movement, a piece of horological legerdemain made possible by drive gears of anti-reflective sapphire, a technique not used by Breguet for the past two decades.

The Tradition Tourbillon 7047 reaches back even further for its inspiration, uniting Breguet’s tourbillon with a fusée-and-chain transmission, a system so historic that it was sketched by Leonardo da Vinci. Looking like a beautifully finished miniaturised bike chain, it ensures constant torque regardless of remaining power. When da Vinci drew that fusée-and-chain in the late 15th century and when Breguet patented his tourbillon in 1801, neither could have imagined sharing a wrist. In the 7047, they do… two geniuses in one watch.

GOOD TO KNOW

A tourbillon cage comprises 70 or so components weighing less than half a gram in total. Between 1796 and 1829 Breguet and his workshops made 40 tourbillons, a quarter of which were likely to have been used for naval navigation and timekeeping.