THE VISIONARY: WILLY BREITLING AND THE RISE OF THE TOOL WATCH

In 1927, Gaston Breitling died suddenly at the young age of 43 , after running the company for 13 years. His passing left a gap in leadership, as his only son, Willy, was then just 14 years old. An entry in the 1946 catalog says Willy was “finishing his technical and commercial studies” in preparation for taking over the family firm. But that’s perhaps overselling it. In reality, he was still a boy, and for the next five years, the company was managed by his mother, Berthe, along with a succession of administrators that, as Willy later told his son, Gregory, didn’t always work in the company’s best interest.

Willy was not yet 19 when, in 1932, he finally convinced his mother it was time for him to join the family business. Within a year, he proved to her just how ready, willing and able he was to take over the management of Breitling but, because of

Swiss law, he had to wait until he turned 20 in 1933 to be officially entered as company administrator in the corporate registry.

I am extremely cautious in using a term like “visionary” as it is so often misused to describe what may have been luck applied to rather mediocre talent. In this case, however, I think it’s an accurate description of Willy Breitling, who steered the company into the modern era with consistency and aplomb.

Willy’s first step as Breitling’s new leader was to take a deep dive into the company archives, immediately grasping the significance of what his father and grandfather had achieved up until then.

It was in those archives that he found his personal vision about how the watch market, and especially the chronograph segment, would evolve over the decades to come.

OPPOSITE: Sprint, ca. 1928, Hahn/Depraz cal. 3, 38 mm case: plaque, hands: Pencil

OPPOSITE:

Breitling ref. 101, ca. 1932, Hahn cal. 3, 36.6 mm case: plaque, hands: Modern

Willy approached his endeavors like a game of chess, working out each of his moves logically, but with an adventurer’s spirit. The result was a period of unbridled creativity. Year after year between 1933 and 1979, Willy introduced one innovation after another, one iconic model after another, including the Premier. In the process, he not only clarified Breitling’s specialty and brand positioning but shaped the development of the chronograph in general.

One of his first orders of business was to revisit the 1923 patent his father had filed—the independent activation “start, pause, restart, stop, reset” action—and saw that this is what needed to be on every wrist chronograph. Independent pushers at two and four, controlling all chronograph functions, in a movement small enough to perfectly fit every wrist. This Breitling patent still defines the function of chronographs today.

And here we see an example of how myth sometimes gets turned into mythos and eventually becomes accepted as truth. Over the years, I have read in books, countless articles, blogs and forum posts that Marcel Roberts was a well-known mathematician hired by Willy Breitling in the 1950s to develop the slide rule for the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) Navitimer.

In fact, Marcel Roberts was no “wellknown mathematician” that Willy happened to find in the ’50s. He had been working with Willy since 1932, helping to design Breitling’s dual-pusher wrist chronograph.

Willy’s son, Gregory, told me recently that, as a child, he’d spent a few days at the Roberts family home in La Chaux-deFonds, where Marcel recounted how he had worked through many nights at the watchmakers table in his basement, building wooden prototypes in the process of developing and optimizing the dual-pusher wrist chronograph mechanism. The full story is that Roberts was named technical director of Breitling in the 1940s and did, in fact, go on to help design the slide rule for the original Chronomat—but not for another seven years after the dual-pusher chronograph was patented in 1933.

Now back to Willy who, having established the technological foundation for the product he wanted, was focused on his strategy to bring his chronographs to the masses. He foresaw a quickly developing world where speed, sports and the needs of the military, aviation and industry would make the wrist chronograph a tool that everyone needed to have.

The excellent archives kept by Serge Maillard, publisher of the longstanding Swiss magazine Europa Star, reveal an interview Willy gave to an Austrian watch magazine in 1935 about his vision for a

“popular” chronograph. He references the example of Kodak and its Brownie camera, which had revolutionized photography by turning it from a professional pursuit to a hobby for everyday people. Kodak did it by producing simplified cameras with reduced functionality, thereby eliminating the barrier of unaffordable pricing. “We have to do something similar with chronographs,” Willy had said. “We have to produce an entry-level product affordable to everyone, that will make people aware that this was something they never thought they needed, but now know they do.”

OPPOSITE, LEFT TO RIGHT: 1933 patent 175564 for the dual-pusher wrist chronograph; Willy’s 1935 interview stating his vision for a mass-market watch that would do for the chronograph what the Kodak “Brownie” had done for cameras

THIS PAGE: 1934-35 advertisements for the dual-pusher chronograph

THIS PAGE:

Montbrillant ref. 709, ca. 1934, Hahn/Depraz cal. 3, 39 mm case: steel, hands: Modern

OPPOSITE:

Sprint ref. 709, ca.

1934, Hahn cal. 39, 38.8 mm case: steel, hands: Modern

Willy believed that every young person needed a chronograph, whether for swimming, running, cycling or driving, and Breitling would be the company that made them accessible. One of the first models he manufactured was a very simple 27 mm wrist chronograph, only able to time up to 60 seconds and only available in chromed cases. The original release wasn’t hugely popular, but it laid the groundwork for more successful models to follow and set the tone for transforming the chronograph into a mass-market product. His next chess move was to introduce branding to the dial as Kodak had done with the Brownie camera. Most watches sold up until the 1930s had sterile dials, meaning no model name, no logo. These were niche products made for jewelers, sold by jewelers to their clients, and sometimes branded with only the jeweler’s name. Willy began to slowly change this, but the first steps were hesitant. As early as the 1920s, the “Breitling” mark appears, but only on a few rare enamel dial pieces. Then the “Montbrillant” and “Sprint” names pop up among the sterile mass. By the mid-1930s, Willy was unabashedly branding dials with the scripted Breitling logo but still playing it safe by adding the Montbrillant and Sprint names to his advertising copy to maximize name recognition.

Willy continued to create tool-watch chronographs, but the market for them had yet to take hold beyond professional use. One of his efforts to tap into the pop- ular zeitgeist resulted in a puzzling foray into decorative cases, a brief trend from the 1920s that he tried to rekindle in chronographs in the late 1930s. These exuberant pieces, called “Dernier Cri,” had elaborately shaped lug attachments that completely overshadowed the functionality of the chronograph. It’s hard to tell whether Willy was truly serious about these overly decorative pieces. Pictures from the 1937 catalog reveal them to be what can only be described as outlandish. To make matters more confusing, he went so far as to register their designs to protect them from copycats.

OPPOSITE, LEFT AND BELOW: A rare ref. 747 from ca. 1942 carries the “LB” logo that Willy’s grandfather had registered in 1892, showing that he continued to experiment with the company’s branding even after settling on the Breitling mark

OPPOSITE, RIGHT: Clamshell ref. 746, ca. 1937, Venus cal. 150, 34.3 mm case: steel, hands: lumed Alpha