Abraham-Louis Breguet advanced the art of watchmaking two centuries in one lifetime.

"Time goes, you say? Ah no! Alas ,Time stays we go".

So wrote the philosopher Aelius Donatus in the 4th century AD. And it is ironic to think that Man has wasted so much time in the vain hope of finding a fountain of youth, and elixir of immortality. Misplaced vanity perhaps. Yet even at the dawn of Man's existence, the simplest sun-dial mocked such arrogance, signposting time's perpetual forward progress with unfailing certainty.

An unalterable fact, time has let the fertile minds of ingenious men to conceive and plot its course with man-made instruments of which the sun-dial remains a rather crude yet necessary beginning. It was the very perpetuity of time which inspired learned men to talk of infinity and eternity thus inspiring even the earliest horologists to find an instrument which could keep pace with time and record its passage.

One of the first watchmakers to develop anything even remotely resembling a perpetual timekeeper was the Swiss born Abraham-Louis Breguet. A recognised technological genius whose creative output out-stripped the thinking of even his most astute contemporaries, Breguet was only 15 when he was apprenticed to the master watchmakers. Born in Neuchatel, Switzerland in 1747, Breguet was only in his thirties when he revolutionised the craft of horology, introducing the world to the reality of the automatic clock, the tactile watch for the blind and so many benchmark innovations that he would be paraded before Kings and Statesmen as the greatest watchmaker of his or any other time.