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Time Travel: We took a walk through the hallowed halls of the Longines Museum

The Longines Museum, a part of the brand’s headquarters in Saint-Imier, is a testament to the watchmaker’s contribution to the world of horology.
I am standing in a room that’s lined wall to wall, floor to ceiling, with records. These records, hand-written and bound in thick red registers—some have yellowed with age and faded to a dull orange—contain information on every Longines watch ever made, since 1867. This the brand has done by meticulously recording each of its watches’ serial numbers for a little over 150 years, using which one can track years of manufacture, models, calibres, and resellers.
Calibre 20H

The year 1867 was when Ernest Francillon, nephew of Auguste Agassiz, who established the brand in 1832, brought all the different arms of the enterprise under one manufactory in Saint-Imier. It was also he who chose the winged hourglass logo to be featured on all its products, and who gave the brand the name ‘Longines’, meaning ‘long meadows’ in the local dialect, inspired by the riverside location of the manufactory.
Calibre 13ZN

Today, this archival room is where the legacy of centuries-old Longines watches can be traced—the brand actually provides the service of furnishing information kept in its archives to watch owners who have had their Longines timepiece for a certain amount of time. It is here that I begin my tour of The Longines Museum, an apt starting point to experience the designs, innovations, and craftsmanship that mark the brand’s legacy.

The Longines Museum
A model of the Spirit of St. Louis at The Longines Museum

The Longines Museum was inaugurated in 1992 for the 160-years anniversary of the brand. Set on the upper floor of Longines’s manufactory within the company’s headquarters in Saint-Imier, the 600-square-metre museum displays about 500 timepieces, navigational instruments, timekeeping devices, and documents such as photographs, posters, films, and 800 written records from the earliest days of the company, like the open register in the records room showing the oldest invoices in Longines’ possession. The museum has been curated in such a way so as to highlight the brand’s prowess in four main areas: Watchmaking tradition and innovation, adventure, sport and timekeeping, and elegance. 

The oldest watch in the Longines Historical Collection, on the right, a pocket watch with Calibre 20A.

We start with the ‘watchmaking tradition and innovation’ section, whose centrepiece is a glass display containing every possible Longines movement ever made. The worlds of digital and analogue meet here as a movable magnifying glass allows one to look more keenly into the movement, while a digital screen pulls up all information on record about the calibre. Watch enthusiasts will particularly enjoy seeing Calibre 20H made in 1878 for the first chronograph pocket watch—it was the first mechanism made by Longines for precision timing. Fitted in a case engraved with a jockey, stopwatches with this calibre were seen on American horse racing tracks in the 1880s. Then there is the popular-among-vintage-watch-collectors 13ZN, the first serial chronograph with a flyback function, produced and commercialised from 1936 to 1951 (the successor to the smaller calibre 13.33Z). The timepiece housing this movement, too, finds pride of place in the museum.

A pocket watch engraved with a jockey

Close by, in a separate case, rest two 1867 pocket watches, with the name 
E Francillon on the dial. The stately, impeccably maintained one on the left, with the serial number 335, is the oldest in the Longines Historical Collection. The one on the right boasts the very first movement made by the Longines manufactory, the 20A. It is a 20-line calibre with an anchor escapement, as well as a pendant winding and time-setting mechanism. Longines was awarded a prize at the Universal Exposition in Paris for this calibre 20A. Another pocket watch that grabs attention is Longines’s first certified chronometer, the Calibre 21.59, based on another calibre developed in-house in 1878.
Longines’ first high-frequency timer to measure 1/10th of a second (1914)

Precision timing was Longines’s core area in the late 1800s and in the first half of the 20th century. In 1911, it created one of the world’s first wrist chronographs made for Russian pilots, based on a pocket watch Calibre 19.73N, and in 1914 and 1916 created the first high-frequency timer to measure 10th of a second (36,000 beats per hour) and 100th of a second (3,60,000 beats per hour), respectively. It is something that the brand concentrates on even today, although the breadth of its offerings have become much more diverse.


Navigation Watches

The Lindbergh Hour Angle Watch with a base metal deck from 1931

Longines history with navigational instruments is well documented, and sure enough, an entire section in the museum is dedicated to this, including a model of the Spirit of St. Louis, the custom-built, single-engine, single-seat, plane that was flown by Charles Lindbergh on the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight from Long Island, New York, to Paris, France. His flight time of 33 hours and 39 minutes from take-off to landing was officially measured by Longines on behalf of the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI). Not just Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, Elinor Smith, Australian Charles Kingsford Smith, and American polar explorer Richard E. Byrd all relied on Longines for their flights. Earhart wore a Longines when she flew solo and nonstop across the Atlantic, from Canada to Northern Ireland in just under 15 hours, as did Elinor Smith, who flew higher than anyone, piloting her aircraft to an altitude of 27,418 feet. For this flight, too, she relied on timepieces from Longines.

The Longines Weems Second-Setting Watch, and the Lindbergh Hour Angle wristwatch

Longines built its first on-board chronometer for the cockpit in an aluminium case in 1915, and in 1929, started producing an important watch for aviators, called the Weems Second-Setting watch, designed by US Navy officer Philip Van Horn Weems. Its inner rotating dial with 60 second markings enabled the wearers to synchronise the watch precisely to the radio time signal, which in turn ensured accurate timing. Then two years later, Longines began producing the Lindbergh Hour Angle Watch, a 47-mm-diameter wristwatch with Caliber 18.69N, as an on-board chronometer with the same movement but encased in a wooden box. This was a watch design by Charles Lindbergh, and enabled pilots to calculate their geographical positions with the help of stars. The watch was used in tandem with a sextant and nautical almanac. Many aviators ordered and used the Hour Angle Watch as a navigational instrument in the 1930s.


In 1938 came the Siderograph, which Longines developed. Named after sidereal time, it dispensed with mean solar time and showed only sidereal time, which it displayed via various scales marked on the dial and on the peripheral bezel in hour angles, minutes, and arc minutes. It helped omit the conversion from solar time to sidereal time, so the aviator could calculate the aircraft’s position faster. Caliber 21.29, which had been developed in 1910 and was considered to be an especially accurate movement, ticked inside the Siderograph’s lightweight and antimagnetic aluminium case. The famous entrepreneur, Hollywood producer, and film director Howard Hughes was one of the first aviators to use the Longines Siderograph.

The Chronocinegines

But even before this, at the request of the Sultan of Istanbul, Longines in 1908 created the first pocket watch indicating two time zones. And then, fuelled by the popularity of air travel, in 1925 it came out with the first GMT wristwatch Zulu Time—2023 released Spirit Zulu Time watches are successors of this very wrist watch.


Sports Timing Equipment


In the light of everything displayed at the museum, it comes as no surprise that Longines was deeply involved in the world of professional sports timekeeping as well. There is another section dedicated to rather unwieldy machines that have reserved their place in sports history. However, their aesthetics are not indicative of the important purpose they served in equestrian sports, alpine events, cycling, and even Formula 1. There is a scale model of Longines’s first electromechanical timing mechanism automatically triggered by an electric wire, a system unveiled in 1912 for the starting and finish lines. It uses wires which when broken, start or stop the stopwatch. This device used a runner’s body to break a clock-connected wire at the beginning and end of a race. This section also features the 1949 Chronocaméra, the first fully automatic timing equipment. It reacted instantly to a signal and gave photographed times in four seconds.
A Longines jewellery watch

In 1953 came Longines’s Chronocinégines, in which a 16mm camera was coupled with a quartz clock—it provided judges with a series of images of the athlete at the finish line taken every hundredth of a second. Also interesting is the 1955 Printogines for rally sports. A special punch printing device with a clock with an eight-day power reserve, it allowed participants to punch their own control card at each checkpoint spread over 5000 kilometres. It then helped determine the winning time, based on the recordings at checkpoints. The next year came the Contifort, which printed the position in time and space of athletes at the finish line.
Longines bejewelled pocketwatch

Elegance is an Attitude
Over the past century, it wasn’t only Longines’s technical prowess making a mark. The watchmaker had an eye for beauty as well, creating several pocket watches with stunning engravings, bejewelled wristwatches for ladies with an overwhelming Art Deco influence, and even watches designed as lighters and cufflinks. In particular, I fell in love with the 10K gold wristwatch with an extendable bracelet that was worn in 1941 by actor Humphrey Bogart, a Longines Ambassador of Elegance.

Art Deco- inspired wristwatches for women

Longines’s motto of ‘Elegance is an attitude’ is much deeper than a romantic thought. There is an undeniable refinement and distinction to its horological mastery. The Longines Museum, and everything it contains, is proof.

This story first published in Oct-Dec 2023 India's print issue

Images: Courtesy brand
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