Feature: How The World’s Smallest Movement Was Made (Part 1)

Maybe you’ve heard Jaeger-LeCoultre referred to as the watchmaker’s watchmaker, the company behind such greats as Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet and Vacheron Constantin? It’s true, Jaeger-LeCoultre has supplied those masters—and many more besides—but you don’t get that kind of gig without already being a master yourself. This is the story of the calibre 101, and how Jaeger-LeCoultre became the watchmaker’s watchmaker.

The watchmaker hit the scene with a bang in 1833, when self-taught tinkerer Antoine LeCoultre decided he wanted to start himself a business. In the workshop owned by his family, where he and his father had studied and invented new metal alloys, LeCoultre forewent the opportunity to manufacturer the produce typically wrought by the machines there, choosing instead to make a machine of his own: a machine that made pinions.

A pinion is the shaft that holds a gear in place, without which it would simply fall out. But its job is so much more significant than that—a pinion that is not true will add friction to the movement, increasing inaccuracy, wear and power consumption.

In this burgeoning Swiss industry built on individuals crafting parts in their own homes during the cold winters, often poorly and inconsistently, LeCoultre set in motion not only the path for his own business, but also that of many other watchmakers for many centuries as well.

He was obsessed with accuracy, driven to further improve his own work to bring efficiency to his mechanisms. It was clear to him how much a Swiss movement was robbed of its performance by the quality of its components, which paled into comparison against their international counterparts.

Jaeger-LeCoultre was founded in 1833, Le Sentier, Le Chenit, Switzerland

But before LeCoultre could set about making better movements, he needed the tools not only to manufacture them, but measure them as well. He could attempt to work to as accurate a tolerance as he liked, but if he had no way to record that tolerance, it would have all been moot.

In 1844, LeCoultre finally realised his goal of measuring the immeasurable, creating a device he called the Millionometer, the first ever built that could accurately record a single micron—that’s a thousandth of a millimetre. Now, stop there for a minute and think about that: it’s not the machine itself that is most impressive, although it is indeed impressive—it’s the thinking behind it that made it possible in the first place.

It’s a classic chicken and egg scenario: if you can’t measure a micron, how do you build a device that can? The tolerances of such a thing would need to be at least as accurate of what it’s capable of measuring, but most likely they would need to be greater. But … with no way of measuring it, it’s a task bordering on the impossible, surely?

Not for Antoine LeCoultre. His understanding of metal and manufacture allowed him to build with the tolerances he needed, even though he was unable to measure them, and with the Millionometer created, he could pass that ability on to others as well. This was the start of the “Grande Maison”, LeCoultre’s original plan to become the greatest watchmaker in all of Switzerland.

Jaeger-LeCoultre was founded by Antoine LeCoultre

By 1888, the manufacturer LeCoultre had become everything Antoine had dreamed of. Employing over 500 staff, winner of the Universal Exhibition gold medal for contributions to the modern age, supplier to Queen Victoria herself, it was a business thriving. The company had accrued over 300 calibres to its name, with over half of them complications.

Furthermore, Antoine had, as his years grew in number, passed the keys to his legacy to his son, Elie, and Elie to his son Jacques-David, who had become fast friends with another manufacturer of mechanical instrumentation: Edmond Jaeger. Jaeger had become famous for supplying watches to the French Navy, and hearing of this rising star in the Vallée de Joux, LeCoultre, had conjured a challenge for this master of precision.

Jaeger had a plan, quite literally, of a movement that would be the thinnest ever made. But he also had a problem—he, and no one else it seemed, had the capability to actually make the damn thing. Up until then it was purely theoretical, a “what if” that was predisposed to a technological breakthrough in order to be physically realised.

But there was one company that might manage it, a company he’d heard mentioned with incredulity and wonder, that had earned the favour of the Queen of England. And so Jaeger wrote a letter to LeCoultre, proposing a challenge: build his movement, and his company and all the valuable contracts he had amassed, would be LeCoultre’s.

The Jaeger-LeCoultre calibre 101 is the world’s smallest watch movement

LeCoultre smashed it, for want of a better term, turning what was once just lines on a page into the calibre 145, a movement just 1.38mm thick and a challenger for the very thinnest still to this day. But what made the calibre 145 impressive wasn’t just its impossible thickness, or rather lack of it, but its performance. This was 1907, when movements twice as thick struggled to keep accurate time or reliable power reserve. The calibre 145 was actually usable, consistent, dependable. Jaeger was true to his word, and so Jaeger-LeCoultre was born.

Far from being the end, this was just the beginning. With Jaeger’s mind for problem solving and LeCoultre’s knowledge in metalworking and precision, the two men set themselves a new challenge, not just to make the thinnest movement, but the smallest. Here the problem grew tenfold, as with an ultra-thin movement, the design problem was quite straightforwardly solved by spreading the components apart and making them as thin as can be; the challenge there was almost entirely LeCoultre’s.

But for the smallest movement in the world, there could be no design tricks. Together, Jaeger and LeCoultre would have to embark on a journey of revolution, technical achievement, and a concept that would push them harder than they’d ever been pushed before. It would be, for them, the defining moment of Jaeger-LeCoultre.

Catch the next article to find out how Edmond Jaeger and Jacques-David LeCoultre tackled the challenge of producing the world’s smallest movement, the calibre 101. To give you a taster of the engineering ability of these two men, here’s a juicy little factoid: the movement remains, to this day, the smallest in the world. Find out more next time.

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