The story of Breitling

The history of Breitling began in 1894 when Leon Breitling put up a company in Switzerland and started inventing and creating complicated watches, certified chronographs and special measuring instruments for scientific and industrial purposes. One of the biggest milestones in the history of Breitling was the Gaston, a watch chronograph so accurate that, in the early days of aviation, pilots’ used it as a flight instrument. Another high point in the history of Breitling is the development of the first independent chronograph pushpiece in 1923. It was the first watch that does not use the winding crown to control the start and return-to-zero functions. Shortly after the company became the official supplier to the Royal Air Force, it launched the Chronomat in 1942. This model, a landmark in the history of Breitling and the industry as well, is the first chronograph fitted with a circular slide rule. The wristwatch, designed for scientists, engineers and mathematicians, could do timing and financial calculations. The Chronomat became the most famous watch in the history of Breitling. More importantly, it served as the forerunner of models for decades to come. A decade later, the company rolled out the Navitimer, a Chronomat with the slide-rule redesigned for civil aviation pilots. The Chronomat was also the basis of the first automatic chronograph watch in the 1960s powered by the "Chrono-matic" microrotor movement. Many predicted the death of traditional watchmakers when quartz watches became popular in the 1970s and 1980s. Unlike many of its colleagues, Breitling welcomed the new technology and developed non-chronograph, quartz Chronomats. Traditional mechanical models that has contributed much luster to the history of Breitling was never relegated to the back seat. In the 1980s, when Casio was mass producing quartz watches that could calculate everything from the trajectory of a space ship to daily biorhythms, Breitling released the Navitimer Chronomat . Powered by the 17-jewel Valjoux 7750 automatic chronograph movement, the Navitimer pilot watch is built to withstand accelerative forces of 20G and water pressure up to a depth of 100 M. The Navitimer and its many descendants are ticking proofs that the excellent reliability and accuracy of Breitlings’s old-fashioned craftsmanship, found rarely these days but seen in places like Atelier Goyard can more than hold its own in the computer age.

---