Longines celebrates its 180th anniversary this year with a great new series of mechanical watches called the Saint-Imier collection. The name is a tribute to the village in the Swiss Jura in the heart of the country’s watchmaking district where the brand was founded. I visited the town last week and stopped by the Longines Museum for a quick trip through time.
Longines celebrates its 180th anniversary this year with a great new series of mechanical watches called the Saint-Imier collection.
Like most Swiss watch companies, Longines began life as a comptoir d’etablissage, the French term for what we would call a cottage industry. The owner of an etablissage produced watches by dividing the work according to components and contracting the production into small, specialized units. In 1830, making a watch involved 54 separate steps, rising to something like 100 at the end of the century, executed by nearly as many types of craftsmen, including everything from scratch-brush scraper to case-spring maker.
