Patek Philippe: A History in Objects, from Patek, Czapek & Cie to the Calatrava, the Nautilus and the Grand Complications

No watchmaker is collected as intensely as Patek Philippe. Its watches set auction records, its archives are consulted like a public register, and its name is used as shorthand for the best that mechanical watchmaking can do. Yet the firm began modestly, as one of dozens of small Geneva workshops finishing and selling watches in the 1830s, and for most of its history it made far fewer watches each year than the large Swiss manufactures. Its reputation rests on a long record of complicated watches, on a few designs that became classics, and on continuity: it has been independent throughout, and owned by one family since 1932.

This feature follows that history through watches in the Atlas catalogue — around 390 Patek Philippe pocket watches and wristwatches from museum collections, the Antiquorum auction archive and dealers in London, Copenhagen, New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Facts about each watch come from the record of the institution or dealer that described it, and are attributed where they are the dealer's own account.

Two Polish émigrés and a French inventor, 1839–1851

Antoni Patek was a Polish cavalry officer who, like many of his compatriots, left Poland after the failed rising of 1830–1831 against Russian rule and settled in Geneva. There, in 1839, he founded a watch business with another Pole, the watchmaker Franciszek Czapek. Patek, Czapek & Cie sold finely cased watches, many with enamelled and engraved decoration, and many of its early customers were fellow Poles.

In 1844, at the Paris industrial exhibition, Patek met Adrien Philippe, a French watchmaker who had devised a way to wind a watch and set its hands from the crown, without a key. Czapek left the partnership in 1845, Philippe joined as technical director, and the firm became Patek & Cie; from 1851 it was Patek Philippe & Cie. Philippe's keyless system, patented in 1845, gave the firm a technical identity at the moment when keyless watches were becoming practical.

The nineteenth century: complications and American customers

From the 1850s Patek Philippe built a reputation for precision and complication. Its watches won prizes at international exhibitions and at the observatory timing competitions in Geneva, and its workshops made chronographs, split-seconds chronographs, repeaters and perpetual calendars for wealthy customers in Europe and the Americas. Tiffany & Co. in New York was an important early retailer, and many Patek watches were sold under the names of jewellers such as Tiffany, Shreve, Crump & Low in Boston and Gübelin in Lucerne, whose names appear on their dials.

Patek Philippe says it made the first Swiss wristwatch, a jewelled bracelet watch completed in 1868 for a Hungarian countess, Koscowicz; like most 'firsts' in watch history, it is the company's own account. For decades wristwatches remained a small, mostly feminine part of its production, and the firm's main business was pocket watches until the 1930s.

Wristwatches, the Depression and the Stern family, 1920–1940

In the 1920s Patek Philippe made rectangular and shaped wristwatches in the Art Deco taste, and its workshops produced the first perpetual calendar wristwatch known, No. 97975, completed in 1925 from a movement made earlier for a pendant watch. The firm's greatest work of the period, however, was a pocket watch: the Supercomplication made for the New York banker Henry Graves Jr. and delivered in 1933, with twenty-four complications, which remained the most complicated watch in the world for more than half a century.

The Depression nearly ended the firm. In 1932 it was bought by the brothers Charles and Jean Stern, who owned the Geneva dial-making firm Stern Frères and had supplied Patek's dials. Jean Stern's son Henri, his grandson Philippe and his great-grandson Thierry later led the company. In the same year Patek introduced a plain round wristwatch, reference 96, later known as the Calatrava. It became the pattern of the classic dress watch.

The classic period, 1940–1970

The decades after 1940 are the heart of the Patek collecting market. The firm made a small number of complicated wristwatches in series — the reference 1518 of 1941 was the first perpetual calendar chronograph wristwatch produced in a regular series — alongside chronographs, world-time watches and an enormous range of simple gold dress watches. In this period it did not make its own chronograph movements: its chronographs used ébauches from Valjoux and Victorin Piguet, finished to Patek's standards.

Patek's world-time watches used a system patented in 1931 by the Geneva watchmaker Louis Cottier, which shows the time in each of twenty-four zones on a rotating city ring. According to the dealer who sold the World Time watch shown below, Patek first fitted it to a reference 96 in 1937 and to the reference 1415 from 1939, and the design returned in the modern reference 5110 and its successors.

Quartz, the Ellipse and the Nautilus, 1968–1985

The late 1960s brought two new directions. In 1968 Patek introduced the Golden Ellipse, a thin, oval-cushion watch whose proportions were based on the golden section; it became one of the firm's longest-lived designs. And when quartz arrived, Patek did not ignore it. It was among the Swiss firms that put the Beta 21, the first Swiss quartz wristwatch movement, developed by the Centre Électronique Horloger in Neuchâtel, into production cases around 1970, and it went on making quartz watches for several decades.

In 1976 Patek introduced the Nautilus, designed by Gérald Genta, who had drawn the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak four years earlier. Like the Royal Oak it was a luxury watch in steel with an integrated bracelet; its rounded octagonal bezel and the 'ears' at its sides were inspired by a ship's porthole. Its thin self-winding movement, calibre 28-255 C, was based on the Jaeger-LeCoultre 920 used in the Royal Oak. Slow to sell at first, the Nautilus became decades later the most sought-after watch the firm makes. A year later, in 1977, Patek introduced calibre 240, an ultra-thin automatic movement with a gold micro-rotor set into the plate.

The 150th anniversary and the grand complications, 1985–2000

In the 1980s, as the Swiss industry recovered from the quartz crisis, Patek Philippe returned decisively to complication. The perpetual calendar reference 3940 of 1985 used a micro-rotor movement derived from calibre 240, and remained in production for two decades. For its 150th anniversary in 1989 the firm completed Calibre 89, a pocket watch with thirty-three complications that took the title of the world's most complicated watch from the Graves Supercomplication, and issued a range of commemorative watches.

In 1996 Patek introduced the annual calendar, reference 5035: a calendar that knows which months have thirty or thirty-one days and needs correcting only once a year, at the end of February. It filled the space between the simple Calatrava and the costly perpetual calendar, and was soon imitated by other makers. In 1996 the firm also launched the advertising campaign that told readers 'You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation', and in 1997 the Aquanaut, a sports watch with a rubber strap, joined the Nautilus.

The twenty-first century

The firm moved its workshops to a new manufacture at Plan-les-Ouates outside Geneva in the late 1990s, and opened the Patek Philippe Museum in Geneva in 2001, with collections of its own watches and of earlier European watchmaking. Its catalogue since then has combined classic references with ever more complicated watches: astronomical displays, minute repeaters and grand complications in wristwatch form. In 2006 it introduced Spiromax, a balance spring of silicon, and in 2009 it replaced the Geneva Seal on its watches with its own standard, the Patek Philippe Seal. Thierry Stern succeeded his father Philippe as president in the same year.

Identifying and researching a Patek Philippe

• Numbers: Patek movements and cases carry separate serial numbers, and the reference number is usually stamped inside the case back. The firm's archives can confirm from these numbers when a watch was made and sold.
• Extract from the archives: Patek Philippe issues extracts for its older watches on request. An extract confirms the movement and case the firm recorded, but not later changes such as a refinished dial.
• Retailers' names: dials signed Tiffany & Co., Gübelin, Beyer, Hausmann, Freccero and others were sold through those retailers; double-signed dials are prized but are also a target for forgers.
• Movements: many early wristwatches used movements finished by Patek from ébauches by other makers, notably Victorin Piguet and Valjoux for chronographs and Jaeger-LeCoultre for the first Nautilus. That is normal, not a sign of a fake.
• Condition: as with any vintage watch, originality of dial, hands and case, and the absence of heavy polishing, matter as much as the reference. Our lesson on buying a vintage watch explains what to check.

Patek Philippe's history is often told as a sequence of record-breaking complications, but the watches in the catalogue tell a broader story: of a firm that sold through jewellers on several continents, adapted to the wristwatch and to quartz, and owed much of its later fame to plain gold Calatravas and to a steel sports watch it was unsure of in 1976. To explore further, browse the catalogue's Patek Philippe records, read the maker's profile and the calibre 240 page, or compare its watches with those of Vacheron Constantin and Audemars Piguet.

Sources & further reading

• Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World — David S. Landes, Harvard University Press, 1983.
• Manufacturing Time: Global Competition in the Watch Industry, 1795–2000 — Amy K. Glasmeier, Guilford Press (New York), 2000.
• A Business History of the Swatch Group — Pierre-Yves Donzé, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
• Technique and History of the Swiss Watch — Eugène Jaquet and Alfred Chapuis, Urs Graf (Olten), 1945 (French); English editions from 1953.
• Watches — David Thompson, British Museum Press (London), 2008.
• Antiquarian Horology — Antiquarian Horological Society, AHS (London), 1953 – present.

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