Abraham-Louis Breguet was born in Neuchâtel on 10 January 1747, the son of a merchant who died when Abraham-Louis was 11. His mother remarried a watchmaker, Joseph Tattet, who noticed the boy's exceptional mechanical aptitude and sent him to Versailles and Paris for apprenticeship when he was 15. In Paris he studied under Ferdinand Berthoud and Jean-Antoine Lépine, two of the leading French watchmakers of the 18th century. He opened his own shop at 39 Quai de l'Horloge on the Île de la Cité in 1775. That same workshop has made watches continuously for 250 years.
By 1782 Breguet had invented the perpétuelle self-winding watch, a pocket watch that wound itself via a pivoting weight moved by the wearer's walk, a solution to the problem of remembering to wind a pocket watch daily. Marie Antoinette commissioned one almost immediately. In the same period he introduced the pare-chute, a shock-absorber for the balance-wheel pivot that made a dropped watch far more likely to survive intact; the Breguet overcoil, a hairspring terminating in a raised curl that corrects for isochronism error; and the Breguet hand and Breguet numeral, the hollow-moon-pointer hand and the slanted Arabic indices that every traditional watch dial has borrowed from.
"Tell me if you can whether any man, in any field, has ever given to his art so great a sum of invention, of improvement, of perfection."- Baron de Fortis, on Breguet in 1820
Breguet's defining commission was the No. 160 "Marie Antoinette", ordered in 1783 by an anonymous client (believed to be an officer of the Queen's guard, Count Axel von Fersen). The brief was to build the most complicated watch possible, at any price. Breguet worked on it for 44 years; it was finally delivered to Antoinette's successors in 1827, four years after his own death and thirty-four years after Antoinette's execution in 1793. The No. 160 included a perpetual calendar, minute repeater, equation of time, moon phase, bimetallic thermometer, and pare-chute, every significant complication then known, in a single gold case. It was stolen from the L.A. Mayer Museum in Jerusalem in 1983 and rediscovered in Tel Aviv in 2007.
The tourbillon, patented on 26 June 1801, was the culmination of Breguet's career. The rotating escapement cage addressed a specific pocket-watch problem: gravity's constant effect on the balance when the watch sat vertically in a waistcoat pocket. Breguet produced roughly 35 tourbillon pocket watches in his lifetime, each priced at twice a standard Breguet. He continued to innovate until his death in Paris on 17 September 1823, aged 76. His clients had included Marie Antoinette, Napoleon Bonaparte (who ordered three Breguets in a single week in 1798), Talleyrand, Tsar Alexander I, Wellington, Murat, Caroline Bonaparte (the first commissioner of a wristwatch, in 1810), and essentially every European head of state of his era.
The Breguet house survived under family ownership until 1870, then passed through a series of owners, the English firm Brown & Son, the French jeweller Chaumet (1970-1987), Investcorp (1987-1999), and since 1999 the Swatch Group. The modern Breguet atelier in the Vallée de Joux produces around 8,000 watches per year, every one traceable to the technical innovations of Abraham-Louis himself. The Classique Tourbillon, the Type XX flyback chronograph (Type XXI/XXII), the Marine, and the Tradition collections remain the modern counterparts of Breguet's 18th-century inventions. The Musée Breguet on the Place Vendôme in Paris displays the No. 169 tourbillon, the Marie Antoinette reconstruction, and dozens of the pieces Breguet himself made at the bench.
