Rare French silver observatory chronometer watch Circa 1897-1898

Silver open faced deck watch by L.Leroy & Cie
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An extremely rare silver French observatory chronometer with chronometer certificate Besançon, circa 1897-1898. This extremely fine chronometer comes from the Leroy Paris collection and had inventory number 375.
The silver test case is glazed on both sides, signed and numbered, and with Besançon test mark. The signed silver-plated guilloche dial has Roman radial hours, outer minutes track, subsidiary dial for the seconds, and blued steel hands. And it has an extremely fine chronometer movement, chronometer balance, cylindrical spiral, and very rare fine adjustment, as prescribed for observatory chronometers.
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Diameter: 54 mm
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Weight: 107 g
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Signed: Leroy Paris
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Leroy et Cie, French watch manufacture
Louis Leroy became a watchmaker at the famous Le Roy et Fils company in 1879. He took over the company with Jules Halley des Fontaines and changed the name of this company to L. Leroy & Cie. Louis’ brothers, Léon Leroy, joined him in 1895 and became business partners in 1914. In 1906 he was named ” Horloger de la Marine “. Watch production was carried out in Besançon at 7 rue Mouillère. Director became Émile Léon Maillard-Salin . In 1901he made the Leroy 01 pocket watch. The most complicated clock of that time, with 975 parts, is now in the Zeit Museum in Besançon, Musée du Temps (Besançon). Functions: hours, minutes, seconds, time in 125 cities, day of the week, month, year, moon phases, seasons, solstices and equinoxes, the sky stood in 2 hemispheres, sunrise and sunset, grand sonnerie, chronograph. Plus five non-clock-related functions: hygrometer, thermometer, barometer, altimeter and compass. Some well-known Swiss watchmakers also worked on this watch, John César Piguet and his son Charles Émile Piguet, as well as Ulysse Capt and Marcel Capt, in l’Orient; Léon-Ernest Aubert made other parts in Le Brassus.
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Leroy was already on the market in 1920 with an invention that can be seen as the forerunner of today’s fashionable >automatic<. Around 1922, his wristwatches bore the inscription: »Systems de remontage’automatique L. Leroy & Cie. 1922«. The Englishman John Harwood improved this system in 1924 and the A. Schild clock factory in Grenchen, Switzerland, was the first in the world to manufacture this type of clock.