French elegant 18 carat yellow gold lever pocket watch Circa 1900

Gold open faced pocket watch
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An elegant French 18 carat gold open faced lever pocket watch with a lanyard chain made by LeRoy in Paris, circa 1935. This watch features a manual wind movement with a lever escapement. It has a pink gilt dial with radial Roman hour numerals, an outer minute track, subsidiary seconds at 6 o’clock and blued Breguet hands. The polished case has an engraved monogram on the back. Accompanied by a lanyard chain.
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Diameter: 49 mm
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Weight: 74.6 g
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Signed: Leroy à Paris
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Leroy et Cie, French watch manufacturer
Louis Leroy entered Le Roy et Fils in 1879. He took over the company with Jules Halley des Fontaines and changed its name to L. Leroy & Cie.

In 1895, Louis’s brother, Léon Leroy, traded with him and became a business partner in 1914. In 1906, he was appointed “Horloger de la Marine”. Production took place in Besançon at 7 Rue Mouillère. The director was Émile Léon Maillard-Salin.

In 1901, he made the Leroy 01 pocket watch. The most complicated watch of that time, with 975 parts, is now in the Musée du Temps in Besançon. It features hours, minutes, seconds, the time in 125 cities, weekday display, month display, year display, moon phases, seasons, solstices and equinoxes, the sky in two hemispheres, sunrise and sunset, Grand Sonnerie and a chronograph, and five further non-clock-related functions viz a hygrometer, thermometer, barometer, altimeter and compass. Well-known Swiss watchmakers John César Piguet and his son Charles Émile Piguet, Ulysse and Marcel Capt, and Léon-Ernest Aubert also worked on this watch. 

Leroy was already on the market in 1920 with an invention that can be considered the forerunner of today’s fashionable automatic. Around 1922, his wristwatches bore the inscription: Système de remontage automatique L. Leroy & Cie. 1922. The Englishman John Harwood improved this system in 1924, and the A. Schild watch factory in Grenchen, Switzerland, was the first to manufacture this type of watch in the world.