Louis Moinet (1768-1853) was a French watchmaker, scholar, and close friend of Abraham-Louis Breguet. In 1816 he produced what he called the Compteur de Tierces, a pocket watch with a dedicated sixty-second counter beating at 216,000 vph (30 Hz, an extraordinarily high frequency for the era). The Compteur de Tierces was discovered in the early 2000s and, in 2013, Guinness World Records certified it as the first chronograph ever made, pre-dating the previously-assumed 1821 invention by Nicolas Rieussec by five years. The piece now resides in the Louis Moinet museum in Saint-Blaise.
The modern Louis Moinet brand was founded in 2004 by Jean-Marie Schaller and his wife Micheline as an independent Swiss manufacture based in Saint-Blaise on Lake Neuchâtel. The Schallers acquired the Louis Moinet trademark rights and began producing watches that echoed the historical Moinet legacy in two directions: first, modern chronographs that referenced the 1816 invention; second, watches with rare-material dials drawn from the house's scientific and exploratory positioning.
The dial programme is Louis Moinet's most distinctive signature. References have used meteorite (Gibeon, Muonionalusta, and others), dinosaur bone (from a 150-million-year-old Allosaurus), fragments of lunar rock (from the Apollo missions), Martian meteorite (from a Zagami meteorite fall in 1962), and Spinosaurus tooth enamel. Each material is thinly sliced and applied as a dial inlay, with the result that no two dials are identical. The brand produces approximately 400 watches per year across all references.
The Memoris (2015) is Louis Moinet's technical signature. A column-wheel chronograph developed in partnership with the movement designer Concepto, it places the chronograph mechanism on the dial side (reverse of the conventional placement), so the chronograph is not a sub-dial at 3 o'clock but a three-dimensional set of levers, cams, and wheels forming the centre of the dial face. Retail runs from approximately CHF 27,500 (Industry Bronze) to CHF 150,000+ (haute-horlogerie tourbillon references) and over CHF 500,000 for single-piece references using rare meteorite or fossil dials.
