Gold Le Coultre hunting cased repeating watch Circa 1900

Gold Le Coultre hunting case repeater
–
A Swiss vintage quarter repeating pocket watch, circa 1900, featuring an 18-carat gold hunting case with three solid gold lids. The watch has a high-quality lever movement that repeats hours and quarters, screwed gold chatons, and wolf’s toothing. It comes with an original white enamel dial with red minutes and Louis XV gold hands, making it a unique and valuable piece.
–
Diameter: 52 mm
–
Weight 97 g
–
Signed: LeCoultre
–
Jaeger-LeCoultre
The earliest records of the LeCoultre family in Switzerland date from the 16th century, when Pierre LeCoultre (circa 1530 – circa 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.
–
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., pooling their employees’ expertise under one roof. Under this set-up, they developed in 1870 the first partially mechanized production processes for complicated movements.
–
By the same year, the manufacturer employed 500 people and was known as the “Grande Maison of the Vallée de Joux”, and 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.