Collecting Breguet Timepieces, Part 1

Qlekta's research: the story of caliber 558 and its descendants from the very beginning.

Abraham-Louis Breguet founded the eponymous brand which remained one of the most prolific watch designers and inventors in watchmaking history for a period spanning over two centuries. This great watchmaker's significant creative heritage, consisting of pieces Breguet created himself or played a direct role in creating, continues to be enriched with a variety of watches manufactured by the brand he founded to this day.

This makes collecting Breguet watches a fascinating pursuit, and one which is both eye-opening and farsighted. Apart from the purely inquisitive and investment-orientated aspects, it’s exciting to know you're a part of this great brand's history, one of the few which never interrupted its business throughout almost 250 years of history — the brand will mark its milestone anniversary of a quarter of a millennium in 2025.

This brand's tourbillons are an extremely interesting subject, including its modern ones. This is partially due to the fact that Abraham-Louis Breguet is credited with the invention of the tourbillon —  a complicated movement with the balance wheel, hairspring and escapement mounted within a rotating carriage.

The tourbillon was invented in 1795, but Abraham-Louis Breguet only received the French patent for it in 1801. The aim of this invention was to increase the accuracy of pocket watches by offsetting errors due to the position of the watch under the influence of gravity by rotating the tourbillon.

The invention has taken on a legendary status in the modern era of luxury watchmaking, and is truly considered to be one of the most beautiful mechanical complications. Breguet was one of the first watch brands to begin commercially producing tourbillon wristwatch series.

This was in 1988, although the brand Audemars Piguet managed to beat Breguet to it just two years earlier. The independent watchmaker Daniel Roth played an active role in developing Breguet's wristwatch tourbillon, who worked with the brand in the 1970s and 1980s.

The manually wound Caliber 558 was very first wristwatch movement equipped with a tourbillon in Breguet's arsenal. It was developed in partnership with the Nouvelle Lémania watch-movement factory, featured 13¼ lines with a 50-hour power reserve, and oscillated at a frequency of 18000 vph.

Lémania was independent at the time, as it separated from the SSIH group during a management buyout in 1980, when SSIH was being merged into Société de Microélectronique et d'Horlogerie (SMH, now Swatch Group). In 1992, Nouvelle Lémania was acquired by the private equity firm Investcorp, which already owned the brand Breguet at that stage.

Nouvelle Lémania entered Groupe Horloger Breguet along with the Breguet brand. In 1999, this group was acquired by Swatch Group, which now owns both Breguet and Nouvelle Lémania. Caliber 558 was equipped with a minute tourbillon. Its basic design has a characteristic structure with an aperture for the tourbillon carriage at 6 o'clock and hour and minute hands shifted above.

Another feature of this movement's construction which Daniel Roth contributed to has been preserved in Breguet tourbillon watches, right up to the current collections: the small seconds displayed on the axis of the three-armed tourbillon in a sector with a calibrated 20-second scale. 

Breguet's first tourbillon wristwatch used Caliber 558 and was referenced in the brand's collection as 3350. Caliber 558 held onto its name even after it was updated in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The watch was given the new reference number of 3357, although it didn't really change that much overall.

For example, the size of the original 35 mm case and all the main design elements stayed the same. Ref. 3357 is still in the brand's current collection, making Ref. 3350 and Ref. 3357 rolled into one the longest-running wristwatch tourbillon model without any significant changes to the design and mechanics since 1988, which is a credit to the brand that invented the tourbillon.

From the very outset, Ref. 3350 was primarily manufactured in yellow gold. Models in rose gold and white gold are rarities, while platinum pieces were produced in miniscule quantities, literally one-off pieces if any, which now only turn up at auctions on extremely rare occasions.

The exotic Ref. 3450 model in a platinum and rose-gold case was produced in slightly larger quantities and resurfaces at auctions every so often. Platinum is used to make the bezel and the caseback for this model. The caseband is comprised of two strips of rose gold trim and a platinum ring with recognizable coinage around the middle. Ref. 3450 is similar to Ref. 3350 — models rendered similarly to Ref. 3357.

All known Ref. 3450 pieces are equipped with first-generation versions of caliber 558 with a second type of engraving on their backplates. Every watch has an unsigned "flat" winding crown, and their dials don't bear the inscription "Swiss Guilloché Main" (we'll come back to these traits later). It's interesting to note that the models with skeletonized movements are also referenced 3450.

Breguet usually uses different reference numbers for skeletonized varieties in its collection to differentiate them from their "parent" models. The skeletonized Ref. 3450 is an extremely rare watch, one of the most striking in the history of Ref. 3350 and its descendants. Collectors should keep their eyes peeled for this model — it can be explosive.

All skeletonized Ref. 3450 watches are equipped with first-generation caliber 558SQ movements. We soon plan on publishing a special investigation into Breguet's skeletonized 3355 tourbillons, another very interesting subject. When it comes to Ref. 3357, it seems platinum wasn't used as a case material whatsoever, the brand only offered gold models.

It really seems like Breguet is saving platinum for sole use in Ref. 3355 skeletons, which are still produced to this day. Ever since Ref. 3350 and Ref. 3357 models entered production, there’ve been numerous versions with distinct variations in their design and movements, although the brand hasn't made any information publicly available on them. 

Moreover, these variations usually aren't reflected in the movement's name or the watch's reference number. The transition from Ref. 3350 to Ref. 3357 is almost the only exception. That's what makes these and other models based on modified versions of caliber 558 unbelievably attractive objects for collectors and research. 

Some light could certainly be shed on the situation if the brand got involved and made archival technical information available. Anyway we highlighted some of the key traits which can be used to trace the stages of evolution Ref. 3350 and Ref. 3357 models.

The first trait is in the watch movement. The initial first-generation version of caliber 558 can easily be identified by the shape of its tourbillon carriage, which had two beams and a protruding n-shaped regulator index. The shape of tourbillon carriages changed in second-generation movements.

They did away with the protrusion along with the index-adjuster itself, resulting in a construction usually referred to as a free-sprung balance in the watchmaking industry. It was given a classic design with three beams spaced the same distance away from each other.

Breguet refers to this modernized movement as 558.1, which are the same digits which appear engraved on the backplate, while 558T is also used in the documentation. The introduction of 558.1 seemingly coincided with the change in the watch's reference number from Ref. 3350 to Ref.3357.

It's interesting to note that the number 3357 has already featured in the brand's history, and in connection with a tourbillon. The number 3357 referred to one of the pieces from a series of tourbillon pocket watches made for Breguet in the 1940s by the Swiss watchmaker Fritz-André Robert-Charrue, celebrated as the watchmaker who created the world's smallest tourbillon.

It's also worth noting the Ref. 3357 with a second-generation movement and Robert-Charrue's 3357 pocket-watch tourbillon both use tourbillon carriages with a similar design and three equidistant beams. These may or may not be coincidences, but the list is rounded out with their inscriptions.

“Régulateur à Tourbillon Inventé par A. L. Breguet Brevet du 7 Messidor An 9” was engraved on the movement of Robert-Charrue's 3357 tourbillon pocket watch, while movements housed in the Ref. 3350 and Ref. 3357 watches are engraved with the inscription “Tourbillon Breguet Brevet du 7 Messidor An 9”. Doesn't this seem just a little too close to be a coincidence?