Month: December 2014

Complex watchmaking can be... well, a time-consuming business. In 1782 the virtuoso French watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet was commissioned to build, as a gift for Marie Antoinette, the most lavish and complicated watch in history, squeezing in an abundance of labyrinthine functions. Neither Marie Antoinette nor even Breguet himself was around to see it completed -- the watchmaker's son finished the job in 1827, a mere 45 years after the original commission.