Brand History - Longines

In 2007, it was its 175th birthday, which it feted with an upgraded version of its Master Collection Retrograde in rose gold. its blue-steel hands also indicating everything from the day and the date to a second time zone on a 24-hour scale.

Last year, it was the 120th anniversary of the registration of Longines’ famous winged hour-glass, which the company confidently claims to be the oldest trade-mark of its kind still in use today.

Longines brought out two editions of the Heritage Retrograde, each limited to just 120 watches, to fete the date, which came 22 years after Ernest Francillon opened his first factory at Les Longines – hence the name – on the right bank of the river Suze at Saint Imler.

In the years since then, Longines has built a reputation for the elegance and quality of its timepieces but also for its involvement in sport, aviation and motor-racing in particular, but also tennis and skiing.

It made advances in photo-finish technology and claims to have been the first to develop a system “to combine timing with a moving image.” It also had fruitful relationships with everyone from Enzo Ferrari to Charles Lindbergh.

Now owned by Swatch, Longines’ sporting tradition shows up in a strong series of sports watch collections, including the Grand Vitesse line with its large-format 12 modelled on racing car numbers, and the numerous incarnations of the Lindbergh Hour Angle watch, based on Lindbergh’s own design and designed to allow for the measurement of longitude (as long as you have a sextant and a nautical almanac to hand)