Tomorrow, June 26, has been declared Tourbillon Day by Breguet, the watchmaker that invented the complication on the same day in 1801.
The company invites the public to celebrate Tourbillon Day each year and its boutiques across the globe will offer the chance to discover its collections and learn more about the history of the complication and how it works.
Abraham-Louis Breguet took 10 years to perfect the tourbillon and only sold 35 tourbillon watches in his lifetime.
At a time when timepieces were worn vertically in the waistcoat pocket, the master watchmaker devised a way of negating the effects of the earth’s attraction on the functioning of the oscillator and, on the basis of this, improving the chronometric accuracy of the movement.
That is when the idea came to him to incorporate the balance wheel and spring as well as the escapement (lever and escape wheel) in a mobile casing rotating on itself — the architecture that survives to the present day as the tourbillon.
The Tourbillon was not invented in 1801 it was patented on that year, it was invented in 1795 and marketed until 1805.