Compagnie des Montres Longines, Francillon SA
Legal form	stock corporation
Founding	1832
seat	Saint-Imier BE , Switzerland
Number of employees	approx. 600
Industry	watch manufacturer

Compagnie des Montres Longines, Francillon SA is a traditional Swiss watch manufacturer with the oldest registered watch trademark in the world. The company traces its origins to a production facility built in 1832 in Saint-Imier , Switzerland, where the company headquarters are still located today. The name is based on a site acquired in 1866. In the company's own museum (opened in 1992) The company's history can be traced through pocket watches, wristwatches, chronographs, timepieces, and navigation instruments. The logo depicts a winged hourglass .

Longines produces mechanical watches as well as quartz watches in the mid- to high-price range. Until 1986, Longines also built its own calibers , The company is now part of the Swatch Group. It produces approximately 1.5 million watches annually. ^[4]

In 1832, Auguste Agassiz , brother of the naturalist Louis Agassiz , together with the watch dealers Henri Raiguel and Florian Morel, opened an office for watch manufacturing and trading in Saint-Imier ( French «Comptoir d'établissage» , purchase of raw movements and parts, assembly work by subcontractors, e.g. watchmakers working in their own homes).

Agassiz presented his "Saint-Imier-style" watches, which soon became known for their exceptional durability, at trade fairs throughout Europe and quickly gained a good reputation and high profile. In 1854, his nephew Ernest Francillon took over management of the company.

Due to a prolonged economic crisis around 1860, the need to reduce costs through rationalization of watchmaking arose; Francillon is considered one of the pioneers of industrial production in Swiss watchmaking, This was done with the significant contribution of Jacques David. In 1876, David, partly triggered by a visit to the World's Fair in Philadelphia , also studied the large-scale production processes at Elgin and Waltham in the United States.and became a partner in Longines in 1880.

In 1866, Francillon purchased a plot of land outside Saint-Imier called Les Longines ("the long meadows") and had a factory built there. One of the location's advantages was the potential for hydropower. The construction of the new factory marked the transition to industrial mass production in Longines' corporate history. From 1867 onwards, pocket watches bearing the logo "E. Francillon, Longines, Suisse" were produced. To protect against counterfeiting, the name "Longines" was registered with the Federal Office for Intellectual Property on May 27, 1889. The hourglass logo was initially used solely to mark movement parts and only appeared on the dial in the 1950s. With its registration with the International Intellectual Property Office in March 1893, Longines became the oldest registered watch brand in the world.

As early as 1873/74, 80 percent of the watches went to the United States of America; The further development of the US market was carried out through distribution partners (from 1880 with Eugene Robert, from 1888 with the A. Wittnauer Company), The business relationship with Wittnauer lasted until 1994.

The first movement with a chronograph function was designated "20H" and dates back to 1878. It was a column-wheel chronograph. The start, stop, and reset functions were controlled by a crown pusher.

Three years after Francillon's death, the first mechanical ladies' pendant watches were created in 1903. Two years later, Longines produced the first mechanically manufactured men's wristwatch, which gradually replaced the pocket watch. In the following years, under the leadership of Adrien Francillon, the company focused on timekeeping in sports and supported scientific expeditions.

A milestone in the development of pilot watches was the model «Weems second setting watch» based on the ideas of Captain Philip van Horn Weems for navigational support. Weems was an instructor at the United States Naval Academy, and Charles Lindbergh was one of his students. Using an adjustable, additional inner dial or a rotating bezel, the clock could be synchronized to the second with a radio-transmitted time signal without affecting the actual running of the clock.

Since 1919, the manufacturer from Saint-Imier has acted as the official timekeeper for the FAI , For example, Longines was responsible for timing the historic Atlantic crossing by American aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh in 1927. Drawing on his experience with the problem of rapid positioning, Lindbergh subsequently advised the watch manufacturer on the development of a special wristwatch that would enable quick and easy longitude determination during a flight.

This clock is also called hour angle clock It is named after the timepiece because the most important component in determining longitude, the Greenwich hour angle, can be read directly from the watch. It was available from 1932 under the name "Lindbergh" and can be functionally classified as an extension of the Weems model. Original models from this early period feature a solid silver case.

Wrist chronographs with «flyback» function Longines already produced in the 1920s, The mechanism was patented in 1936.

In 1929, the airship LZ 127 circumnavigated the world, equipped with on-board chronometers from Longines.

In 1945, the first Longines wristwatch with automatic winding was launched, and in 1952, the company was the official timekeeper of the Oslo Winter Olympics. In 1960, a particularly thin electromagnetic movement was developed. In 1967, the "Ultra-Chron" model, a highly precise automatic wristwatch with 36,000 vibrations per hour, was launched. In 1969, a particularly accurate quartz watch called the "Ultra-Quartz" was presented. Longines first introduced watches with LCD displays in 1972, in collaboration with Texas Instruments. The year of manufacture of Longines watches from the period 1870 to 1969 can be determined to approximately one year by the production serial number, which is engraved on the back or in the case of spring-loaded watches.

Longines built the Wankdorf clock , whose display of the game duration and score of the 1954 World Cup final (« Miracle of Bern ») became widely known through media coverage.

With the advent of quartz watches as mass-produced goods, the company, like many watch manufacturers, ran into financial difficulties and was integrated into the SMH Group in 1983. Today, the Swatch Group is one of the major Swiss watch manufacturers with numerous brands such as Swatch, Breguet , Omega , Blancpain and Longines. Longines ended its own movement production in the 1980s, but since 2009 ETA, as a company of the Swatch Group, has been producing calibers for Longines and according to their specifications for exclusive use. including a column wheel chronograph with the caliber designation L688.

Albert Einstein owned a Longines wristwatch and a Longines pocket watch. The wristwatch was auctioned for $ 596,000 in 2008 , and the pocket watch is part of the collection of the Historical Museum in Bern . Humphrey Bogart (also in the film Casablanca ) also wore Longines watches . Amelia Earhart , Audrey Hepburn , polar explorer Richard Byrd , Howard Hughes or Oskar Schindler , whose watch was sold for over 46,000 US dollars at an auction in March 2019