On 26 June 1801, Abraham-Louis Breguet patented the tourbillon. Two hundred and twenty-five years later, Gregory Kissling, CEO of Breguet since October 2024, welcomed us back to the house's boutique in Geneva to talk about that invention and the watches Breguet has built around its anniversary. "This year we really wanted to celebrate this incredible invention," he said.
A Beauty in Motion
The tourbillon began as an answer to a pocket watch problem. Carried upright for most of the day, a pocket watch lost precision to gravity, so Breguet placed the regulating organ inside a rotating cage. He tried rotations of one, four and six minutes, and different escapements along the way. Over his lifetime he made 40 tourbillon timepieces, 35 of them pocket watches. "What is very interesting is that we had to wait a century before other watchmakers came out with a tourbillon," Kissling said. "It shows you the technological lead our founder had at the time."
On the wrist, which rarely holds one position for long, the tourbillon's original purpose matters less than it did in a pocket. What it has never lost is the view: a cage in constant rotation, the balance beating inside it, one of the most mesmerising sights in watchmaking.
Breguet now has eight tourbillon calibres, varying in cage, inertia, frequency and material. Keeping the craft alive is the harder part. Finishing, assembly and fine-tuning all demand the best watchmakers, and the result has to look as good as it performs. "A tourbillon is a beauty in motion. It's a mechanical art," he said. "This is absolutely our duty, to preserve this savoir-faire."
That commitment to savoir-faire reaches all the way to the tools. For the secret signature on its enamel dials, Breguet still works with a pantograph from 1820. "A tool that was used by our founder to make the secret signature on the enamel dial."
Classique Tourbillon 7357
Kissling began with the Classique 7357, a reinterpretation of the reference 3350, the first tourbillon wristwatch made by the modern Breguet, launched in 1989. The brief was to keep its identity intact. "We didn't change anything, but at the same time, we changed every single component."
Size is the first thing you notice: 35 millimetres across and less than nine millimetres thick. "The trend is definitely going smaller," he said. The lugs now take their cue from the Souscription, and the coin edge on the case is no longer stamped but cut by guillochage, more than 80 lines, each needing three to five passes on the machine.
The off-centre time display remains, but the distance between the dial and the tourbillon cage has been reworked to leave more room for guilloché. Clous de Paris fills the centre, while a barleycorn pattern runs out across the dial and continues onto the main plate. Above the cage, the tourbillon bridge has been redesigned, domed and bevelled by hand. The watch carries the Poinçon Breguet, with a daily precision of plus or minus two seconds and magnetic resistance up to 600 gauss.
Turn it over and the movement is decorated with the Dents de Vaulion, named after a peak in the Vallée de Joux, home to Breguet's manufacture. "So you have a duality between the Clous de Paris, because Breguet started his career in Paris in 1775, and Swiss expertise."
A platinum version sits alongside it, with a dark grey dial and rhodium-plated chapter rings. For Kissling, the metal is a tribute. "Abraham-Louis Breguet was the very first watchmaker to use platinum," he said, pointing to the perpetual watch of 1780.
Tradition Tourbillon Fusée Chaîne 7047
The Tradition Tourbillon Fusée Chaîne is limited to 25 pieces in platinum. Kissling introduced it with a line from Sir David Salomons, one of the greatest Breguet collectors, who owned the Marie Antoinette, number 160: "To carry a fine Breguet watch is to feel that you have the brains of a genius in your pocket." He took it one step further. "With this timepiece on your wrist, you can claim to have not one brain, but two: Abraham-Louis Breguet with the tourbillon, and another genius, Leonardo da Vinci, with the fusée and chain."
The mechanism exists to deliver a constant force. By regulating the torque leaving the barrel, it steadies the amplitude of the balance wheel, and with it the rate. It also takes the tourbillon back to where it started. "The very first tourbillon pocket watch had this kind of fusée and chain," he said, "for exactly that reason."
The chain itself is 25 centimetres long, with 77 links and 232 components, each link coated in Bleu de France by atomic layer deposition. "After assembly, we massage the chain for one hour, because you don't want any friction between the links." Around it, a movement of almost 500 components is skeletonised, its bridges finished with hand-polished, rhodium-plated bevels against the blue.
Breguet makes the chain in-house, and the challenge, he said, is colour. "The challenge is making the entire chain with every link the same colour. The assembly is also quite challenging. But very impressive to see."
Classique Tourbillon Sidéral 7255
Behind the Classique Tourbillon Sidéral sits a question few people think to ask: why did Breguet call his invention a tourbillon at all? Today the word suggests a whirlwind or a vortex of water. "At the time of the invention, it was linked to astronomy, to the cosmos, to the planetary system."
The watch takes that idea literally. At six o'clock, a flying tourbillon removes the upper bridge, and a mystérieuse construction hides the gears between the movement and the cage. "When you look at it, it's as if the tourbillon is in total weightlessness," he said. "The tourbillon was invented to defy gravity, and in total weightlessness, you have no gravity."
The dial is made from aventurine glass, discovered in seventeenth-century Murano when copper oxide found its way into the firing, which is how it earned its name: "aventurina, by chance."
Breguet grinds a block of it into powder and applies it in more than five layers of grand feu enamel, each fired above 800 degrees Celsius. It reads black until the light catches a green hue, and no two dials are alike. Underneath, the solid gold movement carries the Quai de l'Horloge pattern, a nod to the Île de la Cité, where the house began in 1775. The Sidéral is crafted in platinum and limited to 50 pieces.
Marine Tourbillon Équation Marchante 5887
The Marine collection traces back to 1815, when Breguet was appointed watchmaker to the French Royal Navy and went on to deliver more than 70 marine chronometers. "It was the GPS of its day," Kissling said. Without satellites, longitude depended on a sextant and an accurate clock, and a single second could mean an error of around 400 metres. "You can have a rock or no rock when you navigate."
Navigators read the stars at night, and so the dial shows the sky above Paris at midnight on 26 June 1801. Clients can replace it with their own. "The client enters a location, a date, a birthday or a wedding, and a time," he explained. An app on the Breguet website generates that sky, and an artisan paints it onto a sapphire dial, working on both its front and back, more than 450 stars over the course of a week.
Inside is what Kissling calls the most complex movement in Breguet's core collections. A tourbillon sits at five o'clock beside a running equation of time, with a second minute hand tipped by a small sun to show true solar time. The two times align only four times a year, drifting apart by as much as 14 minutes behind and 16 ahead. "To be very accurate, you also need a perpetual calendar," one that accounts for the leap year.
On the back, the Royal Louis, an eighteenth-century ship of the French Royal Navy, is engraved by hand in bas-relief, three months of work. A peripheral rotor keeps it in view, and a compass rose on the barrel cover points north. The 5887 is crafted in platinum and limited to 25 pieces.
Expérimentale 1
The Expérimentale 1 closed the 250th anniversary year and points toward the next chapter. Its case is Breguet gold, an alloy inspired by the founder's own, "not completely yellow, not completely rose, somewhere in between," with palladium added so the colour holds and a hardness greater than stainless steel.
The movement was designed from scratch. Its display borrows from a marine chronometer, the reference 3448, in a regulator layout that reads seconds first, then minutes, then hours, in order of priority. The seconds at twelve o'clock are driven by what Kissling calls the very first 10 hertz tourbillon.
Driving it takes four mainsprings: two barrels in series, each holding two springs separated by sapphire. That much energy creates its own problem, plenty of torque when fully wound and far less at the end of the power reserve. The solution reaches back to Breguet's first patented invention, the constant force escapement of 1798, three years before the tourbillon. The founder combined the two in four experimental pieces, and that discovery became the starting point. The new version adds magnetism. "At Breguet, we like using magnetism. We tame magnetism."
Magnetic repulsion between the escape wheels and the lever gives the balance wheel the same energy from start to finish. Kissling frames it as an answer to three enemies of precision: gravity, handled by the tourbillon; shocks, which can reach 100 to 200 G from simply setting a watch on a table and 5,000 if it falls, handled by frequency; and falling torque, handled by constant force. "Five hertz is good, but ten hertz is better," he said. The result is plus or minus one second a day, the best category of the Poinçon Breguet and five times better than COSC certification.
Getting there meant solving two problems at once. The first was the magnetic track itself, refined through simulation and testing across different escape wheels. The second was the magnet, and the best candidate turned out to be samarium cobalt, set in a non-magnetic environment built from non-ferrous materials including grade 5 titanium, LIGA and silicon. "We knew the goal, but the route was not straight, like every new development."
Not to Copy the Past
Breguet is also moving further upstream. Earlier this year, the house announced a department on a campus dedicated to fundamental research, the stage before R&D. "The roadmap is already on the table," he said. The magnetic escapement may one day leave the experimental line for the core collection. "Delivering a constant force to the balance wheel is a dream for any watchmaker."
When asked how he pushes Breguet forward while respecting its heritage, he returned to the founder's own experiments. "The idea is not to copy the past, but to be inspired. We discovered that Breguet combined these two inventions, and we asked ourselves why. The reason was to increase, again and again, the chronometric performance of the timepiece. We take that spirit with the means of today: materials, technology, and talented people who can design new things. The idea is to forge the path of watchmaking. That's our duty, and this is why we continue to experiment. And number two is already in the pipeline, so stay tuned."
