History
In 1791, watchmaker and goldsmith Jean-François Bautte signed his first watches. He created a manufacturing company in Geneva grouping, for the first time ever, all the watch making facets of that time, which meant starting from the engineering of the watch all the way to the final hand assembly and hand polishing of each watch. In 1852, the watchmaker Constant Girard founded the Girard & Cie Firm in La Chaux-de-Fonds. He, then, married Marie Perregaux and the Girard-Perregaux Manufacture was born in 1856. In 1906, Constant Girard-Gallet, who took over control of the Manufacturer from his father, took over the Bautte House and merged it with Girard-Perregaux & Cie. Since then, the brand has pursued its activities by reinforcing from the 1980s its position in the domain of prestigious mechanical watches, Haute Horlogerie, under the lead of the Macaluso family. In 2011, Sowind Group, the holding incorporating Girard-Perregaux, became a subsidiary of PPR.
The Manufacture has approximately 80 patents in the watch-making domain and is the originator of many innovative concepts.
- 1880: Constant Girard produced the first ever major commercial production of a wristwatch, made for German naval officers and ordered by German Kaiser Wilhelm I for his German naval officers. Two-thousand such watches were ordered and produced, which represents the first important commercialization of wristwatches.
- 1965: Girard-Perregaux designed the first mechanic movement at high frequency, at which the balancer beats at 36,000 vibrations/hour: the Gyromatic HF.
- 1967: Girard-Perregaux receives the Centenary Award from the Astronomical Observatory de Neuchatel in recognition of the accomplishments of the Manufacture generally, and specifically for the Observatory Chronometer wristwatch that used the Gyromatic HF movement
- 1970: Girard-Perregaux presents its first wristwatch to the world to be equipped with a quartz movement and the following year a second one which vibrates at 32,768 hertz, the frequency remaining the universal standard for quartz watches today.
- 2008: The brand presents a constant force escapement at SIHH (International Show of High-End Watch making), distinguishing itself from all the other known escapements to this day.
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