Tag Heuer has its beginnings rooted in a company started in 1860 by Edouard Heuer in a place called St-Imier in Switzerland. This is the company that later joined up with a company called TAG in 1985 (Techniques dAvant Garde) and that is how the modern TAG Heuer was born. TAG originally manufactured precision engineering and high tech technology such as ceramic turbochargers for Formula One cars.

In 1999, TAG Heuer accepted an offer from one the biggest French luxury design houses Louis Vuitton for buying up a majority stake in the company for about $452 million. This resulted in Louis Vuitton owning 50.1% of all TAG Heuer shares thus owning majority of the company.

TAG Heuer watches have behind them the historical achievement of being the first to introduce the automatic chronograph to the world. Heuer was part of a three company joint effort to produce the worlds first automatic chronograph and it was achieved in the first quarter of the year 1969 with the announcement being made in Geneva.

Heuer has also had the opportunity to produce watches that were sold under yet another large international lifestyle brand and design house Abercrombie and Fitch. These watches were produced and sold in the years 1953 and 1954. The designs had tachymeter features that were geared towards rally car drivers who could use their watch to determine the speed of their car over a measured mile and thus calculate whether it was performing optimally or not.

Heuer was also the first to get the patent for a dashboard chronograph that was meant to be used in automobiles and airplanes. The first model had two large hands to show the time of the day and had a smaller dial at the 12o clock position for showing the duration of the journey, which was at that time up to 12 hours.

In 1962, Heuer became the first Swiss watchmaker in space. It was onboard the Mercury Atlas 6 spacecraft, which was Americas first manned spaceflight to orbit the earth. The watch was worn by astronaut John Glenn who was part of the mission.

Heuer was also part of the first wave of digital watches that experimented with LCD and LED displays. These were really new at the time and garnered a lot of attention. The first such watch from the company was the Chronoplit model. This happened during the mid-1970s.