Longines was founded in 1832 in Saint-Imier, Switzerland, by a watchmaker named Auguste Agassiz, and the company has operated there, more or less continuously, ever since. That makes it one of the oldest watch brands in the world with an unbroken history, and that matters more than it sounds, because a lot of the famous Swiss names on store shelves today are resurrections wearing a dead company’s face, and Longines is not one of them. The winged hourglass logo was registered in 1889 and is, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization, the oldest unchanged active trademark in watchmaking. The brand has belonged to the Swatch Group and its predecessors since 1983, where it occupies the elegant middle of the hierarchy, below Omega and above Tissot. I am the kind of person who finds that hierarchy endlessly entertaining, which tells you something about me that you probably already suspected.
Longines’ headquarters in Saint-Imier, where the company has been based since 1832. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
A watchmaker and two lawyers
Longines did not start with a name anyone would recognize. In 1832 Auguste Agassiz opened shop in Saint-Imier with two partners, the lawyers Henri Raiguel and Florian Morel, under the name Raiguel Jeune & Cie. By 1846 both lawyers had retired from the watch business, leaving Agassiz as the sole proprietor, and some years later he brought his nephew Ernest Francillon into the firm. Francillon was a trained economist, which sounds like an odd fit for a watch company until you watch him work: he pushed the company to make only crown-wound pocket watches when key-wound watches were still the norm, and he sent an engineer named Jacques David to America in 1876 to study why the Americans were out-manufacturing the Swiss. David came back with a 108-page report on American production methods, and Francillon used it to drag the company into the industrial age. The decisive move came in 1867, when Francillon built a single factory on the long meadows outside Saint-Imier, the “Les Longines,” consolidating dozens of scattered independent workshops under one roof. The place gave the company its name. In 1889 Francillon registered the winged hourglass trademark, partly to fight the counterfeiters who had already started knocking off the company’s chronographs, which is the kind of problem you only have if things are going well.
The timing years
If Longines has a superpower, it is measuring things accurately while other people do athletic things, and that reputation starts in 1878. That year a watchmaker named Alfred Lugrin built the company’s first chronograph movement, the single-pushpiece caliber 20H, and Longines began timing horse races, a pursuit it has never really left. The company was the official timekeeper of the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896. After World War I it became the official supplier of the International Aeronautical Federation in 1919, and from there it built some of the most important navigation watches of the twentieth century: the Zulu Time of 1925, the first wristwatch to display dual time zones, made for the Royal Canadian Navy; the Weems Avigation watch of 1927, a 48mm giant developed with the naval officer and navigation expert Philip van Horn Weems; and the Lindbergh Hour Angle watch of 1931, a 47.5mm beast based on Weems’s system that Charles Lindbergh helped design after his transatlantic flight, with a rotating bezel and dial that let pilots calculate longitude. In 1934 Longines released the first chronograph with a flyback function, patented in 1936, in the caliber 13ZN line of chronograph movements that collectors still chase today. It is a genuinely staggering run of firsts, and it is also worth noting how long ago all of it was.
A Longines diver chronograph. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
The quartz crisis and the Swatch Group
Longines was not immune to the quartz era, though it did not sit it out either. In 1969 the company developed its first quartz movement, the Ultra-Quartz, in the same year Seiko’s Astron changed everything. But the bigger story of the late twentieth century is corporate, and it is the part that explains the Longines you can buy today. In 1983 Longines’ owner, ASUAG, merged with SSIH, the holding company behind Omega and Tissot, to form SMH, which later became the Swatch Group. When Nicolas Hayek restructured the group in the 1990s, he moved Longines’ movement production entirely to ETA and deliberately repositioned the brand below Omega: Omega would compete with Rolex and Cartier at the high end, and Longines would become the brand of elegance and classicism, emphasizing its historical tradition. The man who ran Longines through all of this was Walter von Känel, president from 1988, who had joined the company back in 1969 and was, by all accounts, the steady hand on the tiller; today the president and CEO is Patrick Aoun. So the trade was made explicit: Longines would keep its history, its factory town, and its name, and in exchange it would stop being a manufacture and become a very good customer of the group parts bin. That is just what happened.
The modern catalogue
Modern Longines is organized around a handful of collections, and if you have browsed a jewelry store in the last twenty years you have seen all of them. The Master Collection, launched in 2005, is the dress line, barleycorn dials and complicated calendar chronographs, the one your dad means when he says “a nice watch.” The HydroConquest, launched in 2007, is the modern diver, a 300-meter water-resistant workhorse that sells in enormous numbers and is probably the best value in the catalogue. The Heritage line mines the archives, and its star is the Legend Diver, a faithful reissue of the company’s 1959 Super Compressor diver, brought back in 2007, issued in bronze in 2020, and resized to 39mm in 2023: it is one of the most beloved reissues in the industry, and the affection is earned. The Spirit collection, launched in 2020, goes after the pilot market with chronometer-certified movements, trading directly on the Lindbergh and Weems legacy. Around the edges there are the dressy rectangular DolceVita and the slim La Grande Classique. The brand still times sports, serving as the official timekeeper of the French Open and a longtime partner of equestrian sport, and it markets everything under the “Elegance is an attitude” slogan with a roster of celebrity ambassadors. The catalogue is huge, and it is worth being honest that a lot of it is reissues, homages, and variations on a theme. Longines’ entire modern identity is built on the premise that its past was so good it can just keep re-releasing it. To be fair, the past was that good.
The Longines Legend Diver in bronze, a reissue of the brand’s 1959 Super Compressor diver, launched in 2020. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Why it matters
Longines matters because the heritage is real, and that is rarer than the industry would like you to believe. This is a company that timed the 1896 Olympics, built the first flyback chronograph, and made the watches that helped pilots navigate before GPS existed, all from the same town in the Jura, continuously, for nearly two centuries. The Legend Diver is a genuinely great watch, the Spirit is one of the better pilot watches at its price, and the HydroConquest is a legitimate bargain against its competitors. The honest caveats are also real, and they are worth stating plainly. Longines does not make its own movements anymore; the calibers are ETA-based, even the good ones, and the company was deliberately positioned as a mid-range brand in the Swatch Group, so you are buying elegant classicism, not manufacture watchmaking. Prices have been climbing steadily, and the catalogue’s dependence on reissues means some releases feel like the archive doing all the work. None of that makes a Longines a bad watch. It makes it exactly what it is: a brand with one of the deepest real histories in Swiss watchmaking, selling well-made, fairly priced watches in the middle of the market, with a marketing department that occasionally asks you to believe the middle of the market is the most romantic place on earth. It is not. But the watches are good.
Official site: longines.com
Thanks for reading this.
