WATCHES
ON YOUR MARKS
These days chronographs are aplenty, but their origins are more interesting yet
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”.