Perrelet Watches

ABRAHAM-LOUIS PERRELET (1729-1826) 

Abraham-Louis Perrelet was born into a modest family in Le Locle on 9 January 1729. His father, Daniel, earned his living as a farmer and carpenter but, during the long winter months, turned his hand to making tools, mainly for watch making. Abraham-Louis showed an early interest in his father's work and became very skilled at it, making attractive little bellows while still an adolescent. Once he had made a dozen of them, he would walk all the way to Neuchâtel, a distance of more than 30 kilometres, to sell them. By the time he was twenty, he knew exactly what he wanted to be in life: a watchmaker. He started an apprenticeship, but his master was lazy and did poor work. After only fifteen days, Abraham-Louis had had enough and decided to strike out on his own.

Being a practical young man, he began by inventing and making the tools he needed to fulfil his ambition: up righting tools, rounding-off tools and tools for making cylinder escapements. His workshop became a veritable horological research laboratory. He was the first in Le Locle to make watches with cylinder, date, equation and duplex escapements. He built all the internal parts of the watch from scratch, first forging a piece of rough brass for the bottom plate, then making the movement-blank, the gear-train, the pinions, the wheels, the escapement and the winding-mechanism.

ONE OF THE GREATEST WATCHMAKERS OF HIS TIME 

Abraham-Louis Perrelet was recognized by his peers as one of the greatest watchmakers of the period. For many years, he trained practically every watchmaker in Le Locle: among his many apprentices were Jacques-Frédéric Houriet (1743-1830), "the father of the Swiss chronometer", and Louis-Frédéric Perrelet (1781-1854), "watchmaker to the kings of France". The historian, A. Bachelin, maintained that Abraham-Louis Breguet was also one of his apprentices. While our research has been unable to prove this conclusively, it is well known that the two men held each other in great esteem and worked together on several occasions.

Whenever watchmakers in the region came up against a problem in their work, they would consult Perrelet. He was always ready to help them out and bring them up to date on his research and discoveries. His charismatic character contributed greatly to the development of the watch making industry in the mountainous region of Neuchâtel.

As he grew older, Abraham-Louis became affectionately known as "Grandpa Perrelet". His extraordinary dexterity and sureness of hand did not diminish with age: the International Museum of Horology in La Chaux-de-Fonds has a watch that he made at the ripe old age of 96! Admired and respected by all, he received many honours and was invited to head the welcoming committee when the King of Prussia visited Le Locle in 1814. Very attached to his roots, Abraham-Louis Perrelet spent his whole life in Le Locle at the family home, at 5 Crêt-Vaillant.

Le Locle, around 1770: surrounded by deep pine forests and lulled by the gently falling snowflakes blanketing its narrow streets, the village sleeps. Only the resonant sound of the bell from Vieux-Moutier and the watchman on his rounds periodically disturb the deep silence. A light shines in the window of a cottage on Crêt-Vaillant. Who can still be up at this late hour? Of course, Abraham-Louis Perrelet! Engrossed in his work, he has just put the finishing touches to his latest invention: the automatic watch.

It all began when he had to find a practical solution to the common problem of what to do when people forgot to wind their watches. Drawing on his imagination, he came up with an original idea: "Why not incorporate in the watch's movement a freely-oscillating weight that would create the necessary energy to wind the mainspring?" It was an innovative idea but one which would need a combination of creative inspiration and skilled craftsmanship. It was here that Perrelet again revealed his genius as a technician. The renowned scientist, Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, (2) recorded in his diary that:

Horace Bénédict de Saussure, for the Société des Arts de Genève 1777.

Perrelet's invention of the automatic watch put him a century and a half ahead of his time. His work of genius coincided with and followed several other great inventions, as Roland Carrera points out in Montres Passion : "... the lightning conductor had been around for less than twenty years. Denis Papin was publishing the results of his experiments with the steam engine and Lavoisier was identifying the composition of air. Other discoveries dating from this period include Newton's law, bacteria, glasses and the piano."

The technical ingenuity of Perrelet's automatic watch can be put on a par with modern industrial inventions as Messrs. Chapuis and Jaquet, who studied one of Perrelet's surviving watches, point out: "... perhaps the researchers and technicians of today who work so enthusiastically on many different types of automatic watches would be surprised at this description [of Perrelet's watch. Two centuries ago, this modest and unpretentious inventor had, with rare good fortune, solved a problem which, until even recently, was the object of a great deal of research and gave rise to many requests for patents." 

This watch bears witness to the exceptional quality of Perrelet's work. After a careful examination of every detail, Mr Pierre Huguenin, a watch expert from Neuchâtel, can certify that, more than two hundred years after Perrelet made it, the automatic winding-mechanism is still functioning well and the watch is in good running order. 

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