The Breguet Names Means More Than Watches

It may be a little bit of a stretch, however not a lot, to say that if it weren’t for the watch firm Breguet, there may be no Air France. And industrial air journey may be a bit completely different, too.

The route between the founding of Breguet watches in 1775 on the Quai de l’Horloge in Paris and air journey as we all know it in the present day has been circuitous. However it principally includes Louis Charles Breguet, a great-great-grandson of the founder, Abraham-Louis Breguet.

Given the household’s background within the watch enterprise, Louis Charles grew up uncovered to mechanical and electrical programs. He was additionally fascinated with the concept of flying. “Like different younger boys on the time, he beloved studying Jules Verne,” stated Emmanuel Breguet, one in all his grandsons who now’s a vp and head of patrimony on the watch firm. (Emmanuel stated he by no means met his grandfather, however he wrote a guide about his life and the planes his firm made, “Breguet: A Century of Aviation.”)

Early in Louis Charles’s profession as {an electrical} engineer, he experimented with machines comparable to a gyroplane, which had spinning blades and bought a few toes off the bottom in 1907 (a precursor to his model of the helicopter that he made about 25 years later).

And in 1911, he began an aviation firm that provided airplanes to the French navy when World Warfare I started three years later.

The quarters have been cramped in these early planes, such because the Breguet 14, a bomber and reconnaissance plane launched in 1916 — that, coincidentally, was the identical mannequin Antoine de Saint-Exupéry flew on the Toulouse-Casablanca-Dakar mail route that helped encourage “The Little Prince.”

Within the airplane, “there was one pilot and one observer in command of a machine gun and radio transmitting messages in Morse code,” stated Alain Rolland, a former Air France pilot who’s now a member of the Affiliation des Amis du Musee de l’Air, or Mates of the Air Museum, based mostly on the Air and House Museum at Paris-Le Bourget Airport, which is simply north of Paris and serves enterprise flights.

But in addition onboard the Breguet 14 — and each different plane on the time — have been two necessities. “To navigate, the pilot wants a watch and a compass,” stated Bernard Pourchet, a former Air France upkeep engineer who additionally belongs to the museum’s Mates group. The watch was used to watch the flight time, whereas the compass offered a strategy to verify the airplane’s course, or “heading.”

Serving Pilots’ Wants

Louis Charles’s grandfather had bought his household curiosity within the watch firm, however the aviator nonetheless had a detailed bond with the corporate nonetheless, and he “grew to become a discreet adviser to the watch firm as a result of he knew what a pilot wants,” Emmanuel stated. “It was simple for him to clarify to the watchmaker what is beneficial for a pilot.” Louis Charles additionally owned a number of Breguet watches, a few of which are actually famous within the firm museum archives in Paris.

After the battle resulted in 1918, Louis Charles turned his consideration to civil aviation, and the following yr he established Compagnie des Messageries Aériennes, or Air Mail Firm. “He was an actual pioneer, constructing an airline for passengers and for transporting the mail,” stated Pierre Acquire, the treasurer of the museum’s Mates affiliation who previously was a take a look at tools designer for the know-how producer Thales.

In 1933, the French authorities negotiated with Louis Charles’s airline — which had merged with one other firm to develop into Air Union — and 4 different airways to kind a nationwide service. The outcome: Air France.

(As for Louis Charles’s airplane manufacturing firm, Breguet Aviation, in 1971 it was acquired by Dassault Aviation, and Avions Marcel Dassault-Breguet Aviation was fashioned. In 1990, the identify was shortened to Dassault Aviation.)

The Breguet watch firm itself additionally made contributions to aviation through the years. In 1952 the French Ministry of Protection introduced a mission code named “Sort 20.” It was in search of a chronograph, a watch that mixes telling time with a stopwatch operate, to be used by the navy air forces.

Breguet gained the contract in 1954, and between 1955 and 1959, it delivered 1,100 of the watches, Emmanuel stated. The mannequin was described as having the ability to withstand vibrations, magnetic fields and temperature modifications and, importantly, had a flyback function that allowed the pilot to cease, reset and restart the chronograph by urgent a pusher simply as soon as. The Sort 20 was issued to navy pilots, whereas a civilian model, the Sort XX, grew to become fashionable amongst non-public pilots and chronograph followers.

Final yr, to mark the seventieth anniversary of the certification of the Sort 20 by the Air Ministry, Breguet issued the watch in each iterations as 42-millimeter computerized stainless-steel fashions that includes variations of its new Caliber 728 motion, which has improved accuracy, the corporate stated in an announcement.

Supersonic Assist

Breguet’s know-how has additionally been used on quite a lot of completely different planes, together with the Concorde, the Franco-British supersonic passenger airplane that flew from 1976 to 2003. The air museum at Le Bourget has two prototypes of the airplane on its tarmac, and guests can see the frilly dashboard the place the Breguet instrumentation is seen.

The museum additionally has a number of examples and prototypes of Louis Charles’s flying machines, which might be seen on self-guided excursions or excursions by the museum’s Mates affiliation.

Emmanuel Breguet famous that, together with making advances in aviation, his grandfather additionally dreamed of creating air journey inexpensive. “It was an obsession of his to have everybody journey by air. He felt air journey needed to be the identical value as journey by practice or by car.”

“He defined his technique for low-cost journey at a convention in 1944,” Emmanuel stated, “and on the identical time he developed a low-cost airplane, the Breguet Deux Ponts, a double-deck airplane. It was the ancestor of the Airbus.

“He bought the Breguet Deux Ponts to Air France for passengers and to the French Air Pressure,” he stated, including “the flights have been very cheap and flew principally between Paris and London and Paris and Marseilles and Algeria.”

Whereas the arrival of the jet pushed Louis Charles’s airplane out of the skies, airways from Spirit to easyJet appear to nonetheless be utilizing his concept in the present day.