Rare Blancpain Steel Tornek Rayville TR900 U.S. Military Diver Watch, 1960s

In 1735, Jehan-Jacques Blancpain opened a modest workshop on the second floor of his farmhouse in the Jura village of Villeret in Switzerland. These humble beginnings would form the foundation of what is now the world’s oldest existing watchmaker and one of the premier brands within the category of Swiss watchmaking.

Like most horologists at the time, Blancpain’s business was, at the beginning, a family affair: Jehan-Jacques’s son and siblings joined in the work at hand. After all, between the honing, polishing, design and assembly, the making of an innovative watch calls for all hands on deck. Since then, even given its deep history, Blancpain has remained a forward-looking brand.

At the end of the 18th century, Jehan-Jacques’s grandson David-Louis endeavored to turn the family business into an international one, traveling to cities across Europe to proffer the family’s distinctive timepieces, which were known for their roue de rencontre, or meeting wheel, escapements. By the early 1800s, Frédéric-Louis Blancpain, Jehan-Jacques’s great-grandson, had begun work on ultra-flat movements and implemented modern means of production at the factory. Soon, Blancpain built a two-story factory that further bolstered its production capacity.

In 1926, Blancpain partnered with British watchmaker John Harwood to produce the first automatic wristwatch, an innovation that had existed only in pocket watches at that point. Then nearly 30 years later, when the race to craft modern dive watches had gained speed and Rolex was unveiling its iconic Submariner, Blancpain introduced its Fifty Fathoms, a timepiece designed initially for the French Navy to be waterproof up to a depth of 50 fathoms.

After two centuries of family management, Blancpain left the hands of its namesake family in 1932, passing between a few owners before being acquired in 1961 by SSIH, the venerable Société Suisse pour l’Industrie Horlogère, whose other subsidiaries include Omega and Tissot. SSIH would sell Blancpain to a member of another Swiss watch family, Jacques Piguet, in the early 1980s. In 2010, Piguet merged with Blancpain under the Swatch Group. Today, Blancpain maintains its painstaking attention to detail, producing fewer than 30 watches per day, each crafted by a single watchmaker.

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