Swiss keyless eight day going watch with power reserve Circa 1936

Gold keyless eight day going watch by LeCoultre & Cie
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A fine and extremely rare Swiss 18 Carat gold keyless eight day going pocket watch with power reserve indication, circa 1936. Retailed by Cartier. Special caliber movement. Silvered dial with applied Arabic hours, outer minute divisions, subsidiary seconds at nine o’clock and moon hands. The plain, brushed case with London import marks for 1936.
Dial signed Cartier, movement signed LeCoultre Co., Cartier number 5076 on both parts of the case, case and movement with LeCoultre numbers.
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Diameter: 47 mm
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Signed: Cartier Swiss – LeCoultre
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Only a very small number of Cartier watches exist with eight day going movements, including wristwatches there are probably fewer than 10 examples known.
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LeCoultre & Cie. The earliest records of the LeCoultre family in Switzerland date from the 16th century, when Pierre LeCoultre (circa 1530 – 1600), a French Huguenot, fled to Geneva from Lisy-sur-Ourcq, France to escape religious persecution. In 1558, he obtained the status of inhabitant but left the following year to acquire a plot of land in the Vallée de Joux. Over time, a small community formed and in 1612, Pierre LeCoultre’s son built a church there, marking the founding of the village of Le Sentier where the company’s manufacturing is still based today.

In 1833, following his invention of the machine to cut watch pinions from steel, Antoine LeCoultre (1803-1881) founded a small watchmaking workshop in Le Sentier where he honed his horological skills to create high quality timepieces. In 1844, he invented the world’s most precise measuring instrument at the time, the millionomètre, and in 1847 he created a keyless system to rewind and set watches. Four years later, he was awarded a gold medal for his work on timepiece precision and mechanization at the first Universal Exhibition in London.

In 1866, at a time when watchmaking skills were divided up among hundreds of small workshops, Antoine and his son, Elie LeCoultre (1842-1917), established the Vallée de Joux’s first full-fledged manufacture, LeCoultre & Cie, bundling their employees’ expertise under one roof. Under this setup, they developed the first partially mechanized production processes for complicated movements in 1870. By the same year, the manufacturer employed 500 people and was known as the Grande Maison of the Vallée de Joux. By 1900, it had created over 350 different calibres of which 128 were equipped with chronograph functions and 99 with repeater mechanisms. From 1902 and for the next 30 years, LeCoultre & Cie produced most of the movement blanks for Patek Philippe of Geneva.