The Breguet Museum in Paris features a pocket watch that inspired the design of the Classique 7225. It’s one of the first four watches equipped with a four-minute tourbillon, only the fifth tourbillon watch ever sold by Breguet, and features a constant-force escapement using a fusée-and-chain mechanism.
It also featured a piston-activated observation seconds, which we’ll get to a bit later. Accuracy was of utmost importance in the 1800s, with chronometry prized above almost everything. Breguet was always pushing the technical boundaries in pursuit of those ends. Examples of similar watches were made, mostly for royalty, between 1802 and 1809, and one of them is coming up for sale at Sotheby’s thematic Breguet auction, with an estimate of CHF 350,000 to 700,000.