A Heuer stopwatch rode along on America's first crewed orbital flight
When John Glenn circled the Earth aboard Mercury Atlas 6 in 1962, he carried a backup clock: a Heuer stopwatch he started by hand 20 seconds after launch. It made Heuer the first Swiss watchmaker in space, decades before the brand gained its TAG prefix. The stopwatch now sits in the San Diego Air and Space Museum.
Edouard Heuer set up his watch company in St-Imier, Switzerland, in 1860. He patented his first chronograph in 1882, and in 1887 an oscillating pinion that major makers of mechanical chronographs still use. In 1911 the company patented the Time of Trip, the first dashboard chronograph, for cars and aircraft, with small hands at the top of the dial tracking journeys of up to 12 hours. His son Charles-Auguste launched the Mikrograph in 1916, the first stopwatch accurate to a hundredth of a second.
Racing gave the brand its identity. From the 1950s through the 1970s, Heuer was a leading maker of stopwatches and timing gear, so drivers, crews and sponsors naturally wore its chronographs. The 1933 Autavia dashboard timer took its name from autos and aviation, and in 1963 great-grandson Jack Heuer designed the pared-down Carrera, a model that has run through ten generations since. Working in secret with Breitling and Hamilton, while Seiko and Zenith raced to do the same, Heuer unveiled one of the first automatic chronographs at press events in Geneva and New York on 3 March 1969.
The company changed hands twice. In 1985 TAG Group, which made high-tech parts such as ceramic turbochargers for Formula One, bought a majority, and the name fused the initials of Techniques d'Avant Garde with the founder's surname. In 1999 the luxury conglomerate LVMH bid 1.15 billion Swiss francs and ended up owning nearly all of it.
Engineering stunts continue. The Monaco V4 drives its movement with belts rather than gears, and the Mikrogirder of 2012 was billed as the fastest chronograph in the world, timing to a two-thousandth of a second.
Source: TAG Heuer
