The Longines Heritage Workshop and Museum in St. Imier

The “long meadows”

Last month, while I was in Geneva—attending Time to Watches and Watches and Wonders—I had the opportunity to take a day out of my busy schedule and head to St. Imier for a personalized tour of the Longines Heritage Workshop and Museum. I have to thank Longines Canada for helping with the arrangements, and Gem Bijou for lending me a beautiful iteration of the Spirit Zulu Time for the duration of the trip. The entire experience was a joy from start to finish—solidifying my belief that watches are so much more than mechanical marvels, but a complex story of the people and the time that produced them.

If you wish to see a video of the experience, you can access it on our YouTube site here.

Longines Factory Tour — Longines Spirit Zulu Time @calibre321

A brief history of Longines

Raiguel Jeune & Cie was founded in 1832 by Auguste Agassiz in the town of Saint-Imier, Switzerland. Little did he know then that his small comptoir — better known today as Longines — would one day be among the top five largest watch makers in the world. Nor was he aware that its brand logo, registered in 1880, would be the longest enduring, unchanged trademark in watchmaking.

But as with every ember, someone must gently breathe it into flame.

Agassiz chose Ernest Francillon, his energetic nephew, for this task. It was Francillon who established the new factory next to the “es longines” — or “the long meadows” — in 1866, from which the company drew its eventual moniker. Francillon also brought on Jacques David in 1867. In his role as technical director, David would revolutionize the Swiss industry and Longines after an 1876 expedition to the World’s Fair in Philadelphia, after which he would publish a 108-page treatise, pulling Switzerland from the comptoir practices of the établissage system and into the world of modern manufacturing.

This resulted in the system built in St. Imier, which has been producing watches, uninterrupted, ever since.

The Longines Heritage Workshop

On the morning of my arrival, bleary eyed from days spent running around Geneva, I felt a certain rush of nostalgia as the car wound its way down from the Jura mountains to the venerable facilities. Only a few hundred yards away, at the train station, upon a ridge in the village, there is a pathway that leads down to the factory—a walk that is made each day by hundreds of employees and for more than one hundred and fifty years.

After a brief meeting with the marketing team and a presentation of the novelties I had already seen in New York, we embarked upon a tour of the Heritage Watch Shop.

It is worth mentioning that unlike other factories, Longines is a quiet place that you might almost mistake to be abandoned, and yet within, the hallways are a hive of activity.

The silence is a consequence, therefore, not of a lack of industry, but because much of the production is still done by hand.

While you can visit the T2 production facilities—dressed in a lab coat and slippers–unfortunately, you cannot take any pictures.

However, this is not the case with the Heritage Workshop.

As a result of having been in production at one location for more than a century-and-a-half, Longines has an enormous storehouse of parts dating back to the mid 19^th century. They are catalogued and kept in drawers.

The brand also actively seeks out and purchases caches of parts from dealers and facilities around the world. One drawer that was shown to me had pieces from an Argentinian company dating back decades.

Should the brand ever exhaust its supply, watchmakers are capable of machining new ones from a specifications ledger—which, of course, has now also been digitized.

The Heritage Workshop is one part of the customer service department—where, as you might imagine from the name, Longines services and repairs its oldest watches.

The workshop itself, employs eleven watchmakers–three of whom are women—and two jewellers. They receive upward of 3000 inquiries every year, and eventually service more than half. The average restoration takes between six and forty hours.

The oldest watch ever serviced by the workshop was a pocket watch from 1867 with the serial number 185. To put that in perspective, the oldest watch in the brand’s museum has a serial number of 535.

While I was there, the workshop was handling a Calibre 990, estimated to take 9 hours at a cost of 1000CHF.

The Longines Museum

After wonderful lunch of Penne Jurasienne at Brasserie de la Place with two members of the Communications Department, I was given a private tour of the museum with Daniel Hug. Hug is the Head of Brand Heritage and probably the pre-eminent authority on all things Longines. To say that I was humbled by his presence is an understatement.

To begin, in anticipation of my arrival, he pulled from the archives a plethora of news articles and relics establishing the Longines/Canada connection which shockingly date back to 1867—the year Canada became a nation and the facilities in St. Imier were inaugurated. In fact, I was dumbfounded by the fact that a Longines dealer was operating in Brockville, Ontario—a stone’s throw from my current home.

Hug also pulled out some seminal pieces like the Legend and Heritage Divers…not to mention the Central Power Reserve which was only recently rereleased earlier this year.

The Longines Museum is situated in an upper floor of Longines’s factory and features more than 500 timepieces (and more than that again in storage). There are also a myriad of photographs and a wealth of models and period paraphernalia showcasing the brand’s ties to pioneering aviators like Amy Johnson, Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon Jr., and, of course, Charles Lindeburg.

Every year, the brand receives 12,000 enquiries from Longines owners who want to know more about their watches. The extensive Longines archives are the key to those answers. Records kept here date back to 1867. And as of last year, the physical volumes have been entirely digitized.

But much of the museum is also devoted to Longines’s participation in sports and sports timing, which dates back more than a century to the development of the company’s Calibre 19.73. The movement, which surfaced in 1890, signaled the brand’s entry into the world of precision competition timing, particularly in the field of equestrian events.

In 1912, for instance, the watchmaker developed an electromechanical method for starting and ending races. You might say, then, that the origin of the adage “down to the wire” started with Longines. Two years later, the watchmaker produced its first high-beat movement, oscillating at 36,000vph. This allowed the brand to attain precision to a tenth of a second. By 1916, Longines could accurately track time to a hundredth.

In the winter of 1924, the Longines team timed their first local ski race. Innovations like light-beam timing and a split second-hand chronograph in the 1930s propelled them to the World Ski Championships in Chamonix, France, in 1939. During the next two decades, Longines would patent a number of timing inventions, including the Chronocamera, electromechanical gates for ski racing, the Contifort photo finish camera, and the Printogines, which recorded sports times on paper.

In 2010, the Longines Quantum Timer could pinpoint sports accuracy to a millionth of a second.

Today, Longines continues its legacy as a sports timer in tennis, gymnastics, and horse racing, among others. Notable events with which Longines has partnered include the Triple Crown and the French Open. But the company also has a lesser-known history with rally cars and Formula One.

Final Thoughts

In the end, I can say that my visit to Longines was certainly a highlight of my recent trip to Geneva. And, if you ever find yourself in that neck of the woods, I dare say you wouldn’t be disappointed with the same. If you are a history buff and a watch lover, then the Longines Workshop and Museum were designed with you in mind. I know I will certainly return.