What do horse racing and stargazing have in common? Well, they are the two pursuits that helped launch the most popular watchmaking complication of all time: the chronograph. Two hundred years ago a French watchmaker called Nicolas Rieussec was commissioned by Louis XVIII to make a device for timing the king’s horses. The ingenious solution was a clock with an ink-tipped nib that would mark the start and end point on the dial. This groundbreaking piece of tech was accurate to within a fifth of a second and Rieussec named it chronograph after the Greek for “time writer”.