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About Breguet
With the whole industry currently searching out silicon solutions, Breguet's CEO and Swatch Group chairman Nicolas G. Hayek just leans back and smiles. Breguet was part of one of the original groups formed to research silicon components, and the investment made at that time is now beginning to bear real fruit.
While other companies seem to be just flirting with the newfangled high-tech material at this time, this historically based brand with an established reputation for innovation is doing a lot more than dabbling: Breguet has introduced two watches with more than one silicon component in the past year. The Classique 5177 contains a new base movement - automatic Caliber 777Q - which leaves plenty of room and opportunity for later complications. But right now it has an escape wheel and pallet fork made of high-tech silicon - in addition to a ceramic ball bearing, a new balance shock protection system by the name of Nivachoc, and DLC coating on the inside of the spring barrel.
Sibling timepiece Classique 5157 is even outfitted with a slim, twin spring barrel movement (Caliber 591A) that houses a veritable array of silicon components including an escape wheel, a pallet fork, and even a balance spring.
All this technical progress should really come as no surprise to watch lovers. Abraham-Louis Breguet, who originally founded his own company in 1775, was one of the watch industry's greatest innovators. To this day, he probably remains the world's most talented and creative watchmaker. His inventions and patents cannot be counted with two hands, and many are still regularly used in watchmaking today - one example being the tourbillon. Others include such important elements as the constant-force escapement, the pare-chute, the upward pointing terminal curve of the balance spring, jump seconds and hours, the perpetual calendar, the idea of twin spring barrels, and lubrication-free escapement.
It was Breguet who patented the tourbillon in 1801 as a way of improving the rate of pocket watches hampered by the effects of gravity. Contrary to wristwatches, pocket watches stand straight up and stationary in a pocket. Since pocket watches are unable to move around as wristwatches do, gravity takes its toll on their accuracy, a status quo that the tourbillon was created to cheat: It was Breguet who came up with the idea of rotating the escapement around its own axis once every minute to this end.
Nowhere is this heritage clearer than in 2007's La Tradition tourbillon, the most complicated evolution of the La Tradition model originally introduced in 2005. This unusual and very vintage-looking wristwatch contains not only a pare-chute mechanism, but also a very obvious tourbillon at the top of the practically nonexistent dial.
It is joined by sister tourbillon Messidor, which is a very transparent regulator model - so transparent, in fact, that the tourbillon seems to literally float between two sheets of sapphire crystal.
Abraham-Louis Breguet would have been proud.
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