Jaeger-LeCoultre

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Jaeger-LeCoultre

logo
legal form Corporation
founding 1833
Seat Le Sentier
management Daniel Riedo
Branch Watch manufacture
Website www.jaeger-lecoultre.com
Status: 2014

Jaeger-LeCoultre is a Swiss watch manufacturer that belongs to the Richemont Group. The company is based in Le Sentier , Switzerland, where the company was founded in 1833 under the name LeCoultre .

history

19th century

Antoine LeCoultre (1803-1881). Picture around 1860
Registered share for CHF 500 of SA de la Fabrique d'Horlogerie LeCoultre & Cie dated June 30, 1899

Jacques David LeCoultre (1781–1850) and his son Charles Antoine LeCoultre (1803–1881) manufactured watch parts in Le Sentier and had done their best to improve the steel required for this. The LeCoultre company was founded in 1833 by Jacques LeCoultres s sons Charles Antoine and François Ulysse LeCoultre (1813–1895) in the Vallée de Joux , Canton of Vaud . Eleven years later, Antoine LeCoultre, who had made a name for himself with the manufacture of high-quality shoots and the development of the “LeCoultre graver”, invented a device for measuring micrometer distances , the millionometer . At the first world exhibition in London in 1851 , he received a gold medal for his developments in the fields of precision and mechanization. In 1847, Antoine LeCoultre invented a keyless watch. It was provided with a rocker, which was operated by a small pusher and which could be used to toggle between the winding and hand setting functions. To prevent bankruptcy in 1858, a partner was sought and the company was renamed LeCoultre, Borgeaud & Cie. Renamed Fabrique d'horlogerie en blanc . In 1859 the company had around 100 employees. From 1866 Antoine's son Élie LeCoultre modernized the company by introducing quality standards . By purchasing machines and uniting all relevant trades under one roof, he created the first watch manufacture . This enabled over 350 different movements to be produced from 1860 to 1890 , 128 of which were equipped with chronograph functions and 99 with repeater mechanisms. In 1877, Antoine LeCoultre and Auguste Borgeaud handed over the business to LeCoultres descendants. Under the management of the three sons, the company was renamed LeCoultre & Cie . In 1888 the company employed 480 people, half of them in the company's own premises in Le Sentier. In 1866 the company LeCoultre & Cie began to manufacture movements with small complications in small series. Then in 1891 two complications, the chronograph function and the minute repeater , were combined in one movement. This development resulted in the manufacture of large complications in the mid-1890s .

20th century

Jacques-David LeCoultre (1875–1948), the grandson of Antoine LeCoultre, became head of watchmaking in 1900 and general manager in 1906. Starting in 1902, LeCoultre & Cie manufactured most of the raw movements (French: ébauches ) for the Geneva-based watch brand Patek Philippe for over 30 years (in 1929 he had tried in vain to acquire a majority stake in Patek Philippe ). From 1907, LeCoultre & Cie supplied raw works to the Parisian watchmaker and industrialist Edmond Jaeger (1850-1922) , who came from Alsace, based on his designs for the world's thinnest pocket watches (with caliber K145 and 1.38 mm height). In 1925, the K7BF Duoplan caliber was developed with the aim of improving the precision of movements for wristwatches. Small wristwatches were in vogue at the time. Small clockworks, however, often lacked reliability. That of Henri Rodanet, the technical director of Etablissements Ed. Jaeger , developed the Duoplan movement was arranged on two levels - hence the name of the model - and the winding crown was embedded in the case on the back. In this way, despite the small size, a large balance wheel could be used to improve the clock rate . The Duoplan was the first wristwatch with sapphire crystal in 1929 . In 1928 the skeletonized pocket watch Grande Complication Email Bleu (caliber 17JSSCCRVQ) with minute repeater, double-hand chronograph and perpetual calendar was produced.

The development of the Duoplan in 1929 led to the development of the smallest mechanical movement in the world to this day, the caliber 101, whose originally 74 (now 98) components together weighed about one gram. The second watch line equipped with the caliber 101, the Joaillerie 101 Étrier , appeared in the 1930s. In 1953, Queen Elizabeth II wore a Jaeger-LeCoultre 101 on her wrist at her coronation. The Reverso model with a reversible case has been available since 1931. It was originally developed for polo players and where the mineral glass watch glass can be turned on its back.

After Jacques-David LeCoultre merged with Edmond Jaeger, watchmaker for the French Navy and supplier to Cartier , in 1930 the company name Jaeger-LeCoultre was created .

The atmospherically driven table clock Atmos was developed in 1928 by Jean-Léon Reutter in Neuchâtel, who sold the patents to Edmond Jaeger in 1930. The first version, patented in 1928, now known as Atmos 1 , was marketed in 1930 by the Compagnie Générale de Radiologie (CGR). In 1936 LeCoultre first acquired the patents for France, and in 1937 also for Switzerland. During the next ten years, the company devoted itself to improving the mechanism, before starting production in its current form in 1946. In 2003, JLC launched the Atmos Mystérieuse, powered by the Jaeger-LeCoultre 583 caliber and consisting of 1460 components. Jaeger-LeCoultre has been commemorating the Austrian artist Gustav Klimt since 2008 when the Atmos Marqueterie was dedicated to him in an edition of ten, which is based on Klimt's work The Expectation .

The collaboration between LeCoultre & Cie and Jaeger resulted in a merger of the two companies under Jacques-David LeCoultre in 1937 under the name Jaeger-LeCoultre . The collaboration with Vacheron Constantin in 1938 led to the merger of the two companies in the holding company SAPIC under the marketing director Georges Ketterer and the administrative director Paul Lebet . One of the directors of Vacheron Constantin, Henri Wallner, became executive director of SAPIC. Another managing director of Vacheron Constantin, Charles Constantin, remained in his role. Since the supply of raw works was to be carried out by the workshops in Sentier from now on, Vacheron Constantin’s raw works developer Albert Pellaton left the company and moved to IWC in 1944 as technical director . In 1944 the world's thinnest wristwatch movement at the time (caliber JLC903 or AP2003) was developed for Audemars Piguet , which was later also used by Vacheron Constantin (VC1003). The administrative director Paul Lebet died in 1945, his position was transferred to Georges Ketterer. The chairman of the board, Jacques-David LeCoultre, died in 1948 and was also succeeded by Georges Ketterer. Charles Constantin resigned in 1949 in favor of his nephew Léon Constantin. With the death of Henri Wallner in 1951, all previous directors of Vacheron Constantin left the management.

The Memovox wrist alarm clock was produced from 1950 and the Futurematic automatic wristwatch from 1951 , followed by the first automatic wrist alarm clock , the Memovox Automatic , from 1956 . On the occasion of the International Geophysical Year 1958, Jaeger-LeCoultre developed a watch that was less sensitive to magnetic fields and impacts and that was waterproof: the Geophysic chronometer watch, which Jules-César Savary proposed as a watch for research stations in the Antarctic. It was driven by the caliber K478BWS that stands out for seventeen jewels , a Breguet spring , a whiplash spring on the balance cock , a shock protection and a Glucydur distinguished beryllium alloy balance. In the year it was launched, the Geophysic was presented to William Anderson , the captain of the first American nuclear submarine to reach the Atlantic from the Pacific under the North Pole. The first automatic wrist alarm for divers, the Deep Sea Automatic Alarm, followed in 1959 .

In 1965, Georges Ketterer left SAPIC and Jaeger-LeCoultre as managing director and majority shareholder to head Vacheron Constantin, which at the same time had been spun off from SAPIC as a subsidiary . Roger LeCoultre's remaining shares in SAPIC were transferred to a holding company called SAPHIR . In 1967, JLC was involved with eleven other manufacturers in the development of Beta 2 , the first quartz wristwatch . In 1969, SAPHIR was sold to Favre-Leuba , the oldest continuously producing watch manufacturer in the world at the time . The management of SAPHIR was then taken over by Henry and Barbara Favre.

For the US market, the LeCoultre brand name was retained from the 1930s to the late 1970s due to tariff restrictions imposed by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 . For the same reason, the watch cases , dials, and hands of these watches were made in the United States. At that time, the American company Vacheron-Constantin-LeCoultre , a subsidiary of Longines- Wittnauer, was responsible for selling the watches for the US market . The brand name Jaeger , on the other hand, was used for watches produced in France.

In 1978, hit by the quartz crisis , a majority stake in the company was sold to VDO Automotive . In 1982 with the K601 and later in the same year with the K608, the world's thinnest quartz movement was offered. In 1986 VDO sold 40% of the shares in Audemars Piguet, but later acquired the remaining shares in Jaeger-LeCoultre, which were owned by the Ketterer family (25%) and a bank (20%). After the quartz crisis subsided in 1989, the Grand Réveil, the first wrist alarm clock with a perpetual calendar and automatic winding, was manufactured and, since 2004, the Master Grand Réveil (like the previous one, with an additional vibration alarm).

21st century

In 2000, selling Mannesmann , the VDO took over in 1991, its stake in Jaeger-LeCoultre as part of the company Les Manufactures Horlogères , the 60% stake in Jaeger-LeCoultre and 100% of the shares in IWC and A. Lange & Söhne held , to the Swiss jewelry and luxury watch company Richemont . That same year, Richemont bought the remaining 40% of JLC from Audemars Piguet. With more than 900 employees, Jaeger-LeCoultre achieved sales of over 240 million Swiss francs in 2006 . In 2006, JLC launched the Reverso grande complication à triptyque , the first watch with three dials whose displays are controlled by a single movement. In 2009, the Master Tourbillon and Reverso Gyrotourbillon 2 watches won the first two prizes in the international chronometry competition of the municipality of Le Locle and the LeLocle watch museum .

The first Jaeger-LeCoultre wristwatch with a major complication has been the Gyrotourbillon I watch since 2004 , with a gimbal- mounted tourbillon . This was followed in 2009 by the Hybris Mechanica à Grande Sonnerie consisting of 1,300 individual parts with 26 complications , one of the most complicated wristwatches in the world. From 2010, the Master Grande Tradition Grande Complication was offered with an orbital tourbillon and minute repeater.

photos

  • Memovox Automatic from 1963

  • Tourbillon wrist watch from Jaeger-LeCoultre

  • Atmos table clock from the 1950s

literature

Web links

Commons : Jaeger-LeCoultre  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Forbes: Leadership Changes At Montblanc And Jaeger-LeCoultre . Retrieved February 14, 2014.
  2. ^ Helmut Kahlert , Richard Mühe , Gisbert L. Brunner , Christian Pfeiffer-Belli: wrist watches: 100 years of development history. Callwey, Munich 1983; 5th edition, ibid 1996, ISBN 3-7667-1241-1 , p. 496.
  3. ^ Peter Braun: Classic wrist watches Heel, Königswinter 2000, ISBN 3-89365-854-8 , pp. 14-23.
  4. ↑ Helmut Kahlert, Richard Mühe, Gisbert L. Brunner, Christian Pfeiffer-Belli: wrist watches: 100 years of development history 1996, p. 496.
  5. ↑ a b c d e f g Franco Cologni: Secrets of Vacheron Constantin . Editions Flammarion, 2005, ISBN 978-2-08-030502-2 . P. 139 ff.
  6. ↑ Test results of the chronometry competition 2009 (PDF) ( Memento of the original from February 20, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Retrieved March 20, 2013. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.concourschronometrie.org