It might be a bit of a stretch, but not much, to say that if it weren’t for the watch company Breguet, there might be no Air France. And commercial air travel might be a bit different, too.
The route between the founding of Breguet watches in 1775 on the Quai de l’Horloge in Paris and air travel as we know it today has been circuitous. But it principally involves Louis Charles Breguet, a great-great-grandson of the founder, Abraham-Louis Breguet.
Given the family’s background in the watch business, Louis Charles grew up exposed to mechanical and electrical systems. He was also fascinated with the idea of flying. “Like other young boys at the time, he loved reading Jules Verne,” said Emmanuel Breguet, one of his grandsons who now is a vice president and head of patrimony at the watch company. (Emmanuel said he never met his grandfather, but he wrote a book about his life and the planes his company made, “Breguet: A Century of Aviation.”)
Early in Louis Charles’s career as an electrical engineer, he experimented with machines such as a gyroplane, which had spinning blades and got a couple of feet off the ground in 1907 (a precursor to his version of the helicopter that he made about 25 years later).
And in 1911, he started an aviation company that supplied airplanes to the French military when World War I began three years later.
The quarters were cramped in those early planes, such as the Breguet 14, a bomber and reconnaissance aircraft introduced in 1916 — that, coincidentally, was the same model Antoine de Saint-Exupéry flew on the Toulouse-Casablanca-Dakar mail route that helped inspire “The Little Prince.”
In the plane, “there was one pilot and one observer in charge of a machine gun and radio transmitting messages in Morse code,” said Alain Rolland, a former Air France pilot who is now a member of the Association des Amis du Musee de l’Air, or Friends of the Air Museum, based at the Air and Space Museum at Paris-Le Bourget Airport, which is just north of Paris and serves business flights.
But also onboard the Breguet 14 — and every other aircraft at the time — were two essentials. “To navigate, the pilot needs a watch and a compass,” said Bernard Pourchet, a former Air France maintenance engineer who also belongs to the museum’s Friends group. The watch was used to monitor the flight time, while the compass provided a way to check the plane’s direction, or “heading.”
Serving Pilots’ Needs
Louis Charles’s grandfather had sold his family interest in the watch company, but the aviator still had a close bond with the company nonetheless, and he “became a discreet adviser to the watch company because he knew what a pilot needs,” Emmanuel said. “It was easy for him to explain to the watchmaker what is useful for a pilot.” Louis Charles also owned several Breguet watches, some of which are now noted in the company museum archives in Paris.
After the war ended in 1918, Louis Charles turned his attention to civil aviation, and the next year he established Compagnie des Messageries Aériennes, or Air Mail Company. “He was a real pioneer, building an airline for passengers and for transporting the mail,” said Pierre Gain, the treasurer of the museum’s Friends association who formerly was a test equipment designer for the technology manufacturer Thales.
In 1933, the French government negotiated with Louis Charles’s airline — which had merged with another company to become Air Union — and four other airlines to form a national carrier. The result: Air France.
(As for Louis Charles’s airplane manufacturing company, Breguet Aviation, in 1971 it was acquired by Dassault Aviation, and Avions Marcel Dassault-Breguet Aviation was formed. In 1990, the name was shortened to Dassault Aviation.)
The Breguet watch company itself also made contributions to aviation over the years. In 1952 the French Ministry of Defense announced a project code named “Type 20.” It was looking for a chronograph, a watch that combines telling time with a stopwatch function, for use by the military air forces.
Breguet won the contract in 1954, and between 1955 and 1959, it delivered 1,100 of the watches, Emmanuel said. The model was described as being able to resist vibrations, magnetic fields and temperature changes and, importantly, had a flyback feature that allowed the pilot to stop, reset and restart the chronograph by pressing a pusher just once. The Type 20 was issued to military pilots, while a civilian version, the Type XX, became popular among private pilots and chronograph fans.
Last year, to mark the 70th anniversary of the certification of the Type 20 by the Air Ministry, Breguet issued the watch in both iterations as 42-millimeter automatic stainless steel models featuring versions of its new Caliber 728 movement, which has improved accuracy, the company said in a statement.
Supersonic Aid
Breguet’s technology has also been used on a variety of different planes, including the Concorde, the Franco-British supersonic passenger plane that flew from 1976 to 2003. The air museum at Le Bourget has two prototypes of the plane on its tarmac, and visitors can see the elaborate dashboard where the Breguet instrumentation is visible.
The museum also has several examples and prototypes of Louis Charles’s flying machines, which can be seen on self-guided tours or tours by the museum’s Friends association.
Emmanuel Breguet noted that, along with making advances in aviation, his grandfather also dreamed of making air travel affordable. “It was an obsession of his to have everyone travel by air. He felt air travel had to be the same price as travel by train or by automobile.”
“He explained his strategy for low-cost travel at a conference in 1944,” Emmanuel said, “and at the same time he developed a low-cost plane, the Breguet Deux Ponts, a double-deck plane. It was the ancestor of the Airbus.
“He sold the Breguet Deux Ponts to Air France for passengers and to the French Air Force,” he said, adding “the flights were very inexpensive and flew mostly between Paris and London and Paris and Marseilles and Algeria.”
While the arrival of the jet pushed Louis Charles’s plane out of the skies, airlines from Spirit to easyJet seem to still be using his idea today.
