THE LÉMANIA LEGACY
Lémania Is Born
As a result of these successes, A. Lugrin S.A. became known as an innovative maker of chronograph movements and won awards for caliber designs. It won medals for entries in the 1906 Milan fair and the 1914 Bern fair. Swiss records document that on March 12, 1918, the name of the Lémania Watch Company is registered in the Canton of Vaud. According to NAWCC life-member Claude Girardin, operation of the company passed to Alfred Lugrin’s son-in-law Marius Meylan as its new managing director in about 1920.
In 1930 the Société Suisse pour l’Industrie Horlogère (SSIH) was formed when Omega and Tissot joined forces. By 1932, the dire economic climate forced Meylan to approach the SSIH to purchase Lémania and save the company. This proved mutually beneficial as Omega in particular would now have free access to Lémania’s superb chronograph movements and Lémania was free to continue to market watches under its own name and it did so for decades.
Albert Piquet was one of the firm’s star designers. His career at Lémania would span more than forty years. One of his first designs was the Lémania 27-CHRO-12, released in 1942. The movement was a tri-compax chronograph with column wheel that included 12-hour elapsed time indication. Working in conjunction with Omega, Piquet further refined this movement to include shock protection and an antimagnetic balance spring, and Omega introduced it in 1946 as the now famed Cal. 321.
Lémania, Omega and the Speedmaster
The post-World War II era was a boon for Lémania as well as all Swiss movement and watch companies as the world returned to peace and the resumption of commercial production. While Lémania and Omega had produced manual-wind chronographs during this period, the 1957 introduction of the Omega Speedmaster profoundly affected the fortunes of both companies. The Speedmaster was powered by the Omega caliber 321 movement, but it was its brilliant horological industrial design that would see it go on to become a timekeeping icon of the 20th century.
The Speedmaster was adopted by NASA for its manned spaceflight program and was informally worn during the latter missions of the Mercury program. It was astronaut Ed White’s spacewalk outside his Gemini capsule that catapulted the Speedmaster to worldwide renown. Henceforth, Omega called it the Speedmaster Professional. With Apollo 11—the first manned landing on the Moon—both Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin wore their Speedmasters as crucial timekeeping instruments and made the watch one of the most desired watches in the world—the “first watch worn on the Moon”—as Omega proudly advertised.
A new chronograph caliber appeared in 1965—the Lémania 1873– and this was the basis of the Omega 861 subsequently used in the Speedmaster Professional from late 1967 onward. Differences from the 321 included the switch from a column wheel to a shuttle/cam chronograph mechanism, eliminating the screws in the balance wheel, increasing the beat to 21,600 bph, incorporating a flat balance spring and changing the shape of the main bridge.
Solid image
The Apollo Moon missions and caliber improvements solidified Lémania’s reputation and its chronograph movements were also employed by Breitling, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, Girard-Perregaux and many others and at all price ranges. Of course, Lémania’s chronographs were all manual-wind, 17-jewel movements, and the circumstances surrounding the race to change that and create the first Swiss automatic chronograph is well documented. The first Breitling, Heuer and Hamilton watches with automatics first appeared in 1969, while Zenith also worked on its own automatic chronograph and introduced its El Primero movement the same year.
Lémania, however, was slow to get out of the gate. Perhaps this is so because Valjoux, its chief competitor in the manufacture of chronograph movements, did not offer an automatic chronograph movement, but eventually Lémania did begin work on an automatic chronograph. This was in the early 1970s and there is little doubt Albert Piquet was also involved with its design.
The subdial configuration he selected was a 12-hour counter at six o’clock, a sweep second at nine o’clock and a 24-hour counter at 12 o’clock. It had central stop seconds and stop minutes counters, with the latter having a swept-wing fighter tip to distinguish it from the second counter. In addition, it displayed date and day at three o’clock.
Lémania worked to lower the cost of chronograph manufacture with its best-known early model, the Caliber 5100. The 17-jewel movement employed pillar construction, meaning the stamped bridges and some other parts were pinned to the main plate with tiny pillars, and as little machining as possible was performed. Numerous parts were nylon, the most prominent being the grey rotor bumper stops which also served to provide support to the rotor in the event of hard shocks. The chronograph module was placed between the dial and the base plate instead of traditionally between the base plate and automatic winding mechanism. It employed the Kif-Flector shock absorbing system, instead of the industry standard Incabloc.
Piquet wanted a rugged chronograph movement with the 5100 to be used in demanding sports activities and even military use, not simply a chronograph dress watch movement. In this, Lémania succeeded.
The Lémania 5100, introduced in 1978, was adopted by Heuer, Omega, Sinn, Orfina’s Porsche Design, Tutima and many other brands and was manufactured for more than a quarter of a century. The Tutima and Sinn chronographs with the 5100 continued to be supplied to the German military and actually succeeded in prolonging the movement’s production. Production finally ceased in the early 2000s, but ETA revisited the design. It completely re-engineered the movement with all-new tooling and introduced it as the 15-jewel C01.211 exclusively for Tissot in its mechanical chronograph models.
