Vacheron Constantin

The beginning of Vacheron Constantin is recorded in an apprenticeship contract. In Geneva in 1755, Jean-Marc Vacheron took on an apprentice for his watchmaking workshop. The document survives from a business whose later work would range from very thin watches to elaborate astronomical mechanisms.

The second name arrived more than sixty years later. In 1819, the founder's grandson Jacques Barthélémi Vacheron entered a partnership with François Constantin, a businessman who traveled to find customers beyond Geneva. A workshop making watches also needed someone to take them to the people who might buy them.

Production changed under Georges-Auguste Leschot. Commissioned in 1839 to improve its methods, he developed machines that helped reproduce components to consistent dimensions. A pantograph could transfer a shape at a different scale. Adapted to watchmaking, it helped reduce the amount of individual adjustment needed to make parts fit.

The company's records also show how far those parts could be reduced. Its caliber 1003, introduced for the bicentenary in 1955, was only 1.64 mm thick. A slim watch was not simply a large movement hidden in a smaller case; its construction had to be thin from the start.

The Maltese cross, adopted as the emblem in 1880, came from the shape of a component used in the winding mechanism. It is now visible on watches and bracelets far removed from that original use. A practical part became the signature of the workshop.