Jaeger Le Coultre

Jaeger Le Coultre was founded by an inventor

Jaeger Le Coultre can trace its time-honoured history back to the 16th century: At that time, the French Huguenot Pierre LeCoultre (circa 1530 - circa 1600) fled religious persecution to Switzerland and settled in the small village of Le Sentier, where his descendant Antoine LeCoultre (1803-1881) founded a small watchmaking workshop in 1833. Antoine LeCoultre was a talented engineer who developed various innovative machines and mechanisms, including the millionometer, a device for measuring micrometre distances, which at that time in 1844 was considered the most precise measuring instrument in the world, and in 1847, he invented a system for keyless winding of clocks. At the first Great Exhibition in London in 1851, Antoine LeCoultre was awarded a gold medal for his achievements in watch design. In 1866, he and his son Elie LeCoultre (1842-1917) established the first fully-fledged watch manufacture LeCoultre & Cie. in Le Sentier, at a time when there were only a large number of small, specialised workshops - a bold and pioneering step that was to pay off.

The smallest clock movement in the world and other innovations

Jaeger Le Coultre owes its name to the meeting of Jacques-David LeCoultre (1875-1948), the grandson of company founder Antoine LeCoultre, and the Parisian industrialist and watchmaker Edmond Jaeger (1850-1922), who was also regarded as a resourceful designer with a pronounced sense of style. After Jacques LeCoultre had unsuccessfully attempted to take over the Geneva watch manufacturer Patek Philippe, for which he had produced the majority of the movement blanks since 1902, a collaboration with Jaeger - who had previously supplied the French navy and the jewellery and watch company Cartier - was formed and the company Jaeger Le Coultre was born. Queen Elizabeth II wore a Jaeger Le Coultre 101 on her wrist at her coronation in 1953 - and thus the world's smallest mechanical movement to date, which had already been developed in 1929.

Technically and aesthetically sophisticated watch models

To this day, Jaeger Le Coultre is one of the few manufacturers that can carry out all the steps in the production of luxury watches under one roof. Jaeger Le Coultre's most famous models include the Reverso, which was designed to be particularly robust to withstand the hard knocks of a polo match. With the Duoplan model, Jaeger Le Coultre succeeded in designing a model that was both particularly small and exceptionally reliable. The Atmos model requires almost no human intervention or energy and has been given as a gift to special guests of the Swiss government since 1950. Other well-known Jaeger Le Coultre product lines include Futurematic, Memovox and Geophysic. The German title of the third part of the Idoru trilogy by US author William Gibson (born 1948), All Tomorrow's Parties, was inspired by the Jaeger Le Coultre watch model of the same name.