Breitling

A stopwatch is useful only if its controls do what the person timing an event expects. That practical question runs through the work of three generations of the Breitling family.

Léon Breitling opened his workshop in Saint-Imier in 1884 and developed chronographs and timers. His son Gaston brought an important change to the wrist chronograph in 1915: a separate button above the winding crown operated the stopwatch. Winding a watch and timing an event no longer depended on the same control.

The separation continued. In 1923, Breitling kept starting and stopping on the button while moving reset to the crown. A measurement could now be stopped and resumed without returning the hands to zero. In 1934, under Willy Breitling, a second button below the crown took over the reset function, producing the two-button shape familiar on many chronographs today.

Aviation gave these instruments another setting. Pilots needed elapsed-time measurements and calculations involving distance, speed and fuel. The Navitimer combined a chronograph with a circular slide rule, putting those functions around one face.

That crowded display is quite different from the plain appearance often associated with a pilot's watch. It reflects another job: not just reading the hour quickly, but using the watch to calculate. Breitling's history is partly the story of finding places for those additional operations—first on the case, then around the dial.