Style Edit: Breguet’s tourbillon legacy and its enduring role in watchmaking history
From Abraham-Louis Breguet’s 1801 patent to 2025’s Expérimentale 1, the tourbillon remains at the heart of the maison’s ongoing horological innovation
There have been moments in watchmaking when a problem as fundamental as gravity became the starting point for an entirely new chapter in horology. For Abraham-Louis Breguet, that moment came at the turn of the 19th century. In the pocket watches of his era, the balance and hairspring were particularly vulnerable to the effects of gravity with the watch remaining in a vertical position for extended periods. His solution was not to fight gravity, but to keep the regulating mechanisms moving through it.
On June 26, 1801, Breguet was granted a patent for his tourbillon regulator. Its ingenious principle was to place the escapement and regulating organ inside a rotating cage, continuously changing their position relative to gravity. By averaging out positional errors, the mechanism could improve the consistency of the watch’s timekeeping.