Longines
| Compagnie des Montres Longines, Francillon SA
|
|
|---|---|
 |
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| legal form | Corporation |
| founding | 1832 |
| Seat |
Saint-Imier BE Switzerland
|
| Branch | Watch manufacturer |
| Website | www.longines.ch |
The Compagnie des Montres Longines, Francillon SA is a traditional Swiss watch manufacturer with the oldest registered watch brand in the world. The company goes back to a production facility that was built in 1832 in Saint-Imier , Switzerland , where the company's headquarters are still located today. In the company's own museum, the company's history can be retraced using pocket and wristwatches, chronographs, timing devices and navigation instruments. The logo represents a winged hourglass .
Longines produces high quality watches in the higher price range. Longines also built its own calibres until 1986 .
history
In 1832 Auguste Agassiz opened a watch trade and manufacture in Saint-Imier together with the watch dealers Henri Raiguel and Florian Morel. Agassiz presented the watches "in the style of Saint-Imier", which soon became known as particularly durable, at trade fairs all over Europe and quickly gained a good reputation and a high level of awareness. In 1854 his nephew Ernest Francillon took over the management. In 1866 he bought a piece of land outside of Saint-Imier called les Longines (“the elongated meadows”) and had a factory built there, in which from 1867 pocket watches with the drawing “E. Francillon, Longines, Suisse ». To protect against counterfeiting, the name "Longines" was registered with the Swiss Federal Office of Intellectual Property on May 27, 1889 . With its registration with the International Intellectual Property Office in March 1893, Longines became the world's oldest registered watch brand.
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Three years after Francillon's death, the first mechanical ladies' pendant watches were made in 1903. Two years later, Longines produced the first mechanically manufactured men's wristwatch, which gradually replaced the pocket watch. In the years that followed, the company focused on timing sports and supported scientific expeditions. Longines, for example, was B. responsible for the time measurement of the historical Atlantic crossing by the American aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh in 1927. Lindbergh then advised the watch manufacturer on the basis of his experience with the problem of fast positioning in the development of a special wristwatch that should enable the longitude to be determined quickly and easily during a flight. This clock is also known as the hour angle clock because the most important part of determining the longitude, the Greenwich hour angle , can be read directly from the clock. It was available from 1932 under the name "Lindbergh".
In 1945 the first Longines wristwatch with an automatic winding system came onto the market, and in 1952 the company was the official timekeeper for the Oslo Winter Olympics. In 1960 a particularly flat electromagnetic movement was developed, in 1967 with the “Ultra-Chron” model, a very precise automatic wristwatch with 36,000 vibrations per hour, and in 1969 a particularly precise quartz watch called “Ultra-Quartz” was presented.
The year of manufacture of Longines watches from 1870 to 1969 can be determined to within a year by the production serial number, which is engraved on the back or in the lid of spring-loaded watches.
With the advent of quartz watches as mass-produced goods, the company, like many watch manufacturers, ran into economic difficulties at the beginning of the 1980s and was integrated into the SMH Group, which today is one of the major brands as the Swatch Group with numerous brands such as Swatch, Breguet , Omega , Blancpain and Longines Swiss watch manufacturer is. In this way, group-internal synergies can be used, such as the supply of high-quality housing parts by the sister company Georges Ruedin SA in Bassecourt.
literature
- Festschrift 1889–1989. Longines, St. Imier 1989.
- Daria Marozzi, G. Toselli: Longines. Bologna 1990.
- John Goldberger: Longines Watches. Ebner 2006, ISBN 3-87188-073-6 .
Web links
- Longines website
- Anne Beuchat-Bessire: Longines. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
- http://watch-wiki.de/index.php?title=Longines
Individual evidence
- ^ Helmut Kahlert , Richard Mühe , Gisbert L. Brunner : Wristwatches: 100 years of development history. Callwey, Munich 1983; 5th edition, ibid. 1996, ISBN 3-7667-1241-1 , p. 7.
- ^ Gisbert L. Brunner : The hour angle wristwatch type "Lindbergh" from Longines. In: Old clocks. No. 2, 1983, pp. 128-131.
- ↑ Serial numbers of Longines watches from 1870 to 1969.