Any evocation of the history of watchmaking, at least until the twentieth century, suggests that time was a male preserve, with no mention of the female figures whose contribution helped advance the science of time measurement, or who in any way left their name on this “human adventure.” With one exception. Nicole-Reine Lepaute (1723-1788), a French astronomer and mathematician, performed the complex calculations which her husband, royal clockmaker Jean-André Lepaute, needed to make astronomical clocks — which she also helped build. 

We owe her the table setting out the number of oscillations for pendulums of different lengths that was published in Traité d’Horlogerie, under her husband’s name. Her work alongside her husband introduced her to the astronomer Jérôme de Lalande. Two of their most important collaborations were to predict the exact date of the return of Halley’s Comet in 1759 and calculation of the astronomical ephemerides that were published as La Connaissance du Temps. Lalande was associated with the mathematician Alexis Clairaut, and while Clairaut refused to credit Nicole-Reine Lepaute in his publications, de Lalande publicly recognised her work. She became the first woman to be elected to the Académie des Sciences in Béziers. She was, declared Jérôme de Lalande, “a master rather than a pupil” who “devoted herself successfully to astronomical calculations.” 

Put simply, the Enlightenment excluded women from academic circles, universities and scientific professions. Educated women were either self-taught or instructed by tutors or a liberal-minded father. Indeed, Rousseau writes in Emile, or On Education that “the education of women must be relative to men.” A scientist such as Nicole-Reine Lepaute was very much the exception at a time when the most social recognition a woman could hope for was to host a literary salon. Which didn’t mean women were watchmaking absentees. “From the 1730s until well into the nineteenth century, watches became an important dress accessory, for both men and women,” writes the historian Dominique Fléchon in his reference work, The Mastery of Time. “In wealthy families, it was customary to put several watches into the bride’s basket. She would then distribute them among her friends and bridesmaids. Ladies at that time would wear their timepiece as a neck pendant or, like fashionable men, hung from a chatelaine attached to the belt.”

Even before the Enlightenment, women had adopted the watch as part of their attire. A century earlier, cases were decorated with beautiful champlevé or cloisonné enamels, often combined with other arts such as engraving. Watches were worn prominently, around the neck and even, thanks to advances made in the miniaturisation of mechanisms, fitted into earrings or rings. An inventory of the jewels of Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603), drawn up in 1587, reveals that the English monarch possessed a large number of watches to be worn around the neck, on the finger or at the belt, as Dominique Fléchon notes. However, horological history remembers Elizabeth, who reigned over Ireland and England from 1558 until her death, as the first person believed to have worn a watch on her wrist. Mounted in a round case set with diamonds and suspended from an “armlet”, it was gifted to her in 1572 by her favourite and Master of the Horse, the Earl of Leicester.

As interest in horology spread through the European courts, women’s enthusiasm for these early timepieces went beyond the desire to show off such elaborately decorated and jewelled artefacts. Already, their mechanisms enthralled, as illustrated by Queen Marie-Antoinette’s (1755-1793) admiration for Abraham-Louis Breguet, watchmaker to the French Navy. The queen supported Breguet’s career and spoke highly of him at court and to foreign visitors. Her husband, Louis XVI, commissioned several pieces from him as gifts for his wife. However, it would be another of the queen’s admirers, most likely her favourite, the Swede Hans Axel von Fersen, who approached the celebrated watchmaker for an exceptional timepiece for the French queen: a pocket watch that still ranks among the most complex ever made with its 23 complications, that is, all those known at the time. Alas, Marie-Antoinette was taken to the guillotine before the watch’s completion, in 1802, after nineteen years. 

Queen Marie-Antoinette was not alone in her appreciation of Breguet’s talent. Caroline de Murat (1782-1838), Queen of Naples and sister of Emperor Napoleon I, was another of the feted watchmaker’s loyal customers. According to Emmanuel Breguet, a descendent of the great man and historian of the Breguet company, she purchased her first Breguet watch in 1805 when she was 23 years old. By 1814 her collection had grown to include 34 Breguet timepieces, including one which she acquired in 1812. This historically important piece is another very early example of a wristwatch. Designed in consultation with Caroline de Murat, it is recorded in company registers as “an oblong repeater for a bracelet”: in fact a wristlet of hair woven with gold threads. A quarter repeater that also incorporated a mechanical thermometer, its unusual oval shape was reprised by Breguet for the contemporary Reine de Naples collection. 

Others, as well as Abraham-Louis Breguet, imagined wristwatches for women. Patek Philippe is one. In 1868 the company made a wristwatch, its rectangular yellow gold case embellished with enamel and diamonds, for the Hungarian Countess Koscowicz. The first Patek Philippe minute repeater for the wrist was also made for a woman. A five-minute repeater with two gongs, cased in a 33.6mm platinum case, it was sold in New York in 1916 to a certain Mrs D.O. Wickham. Around the same time, in 1912 to be precise, another woman, or rather a young girl, inspired Hermès for its first wristwatch. Jacqueline Hermès, the granddaughter of founder Thierry Hermès, is said to have asked her father to make a case for her pocket watch which she found impractical for her leisure activities. Her father obliged with a “porte-oignon” in leather which the young Jacqueline could strap to her wrist. A century later, in 2012, La Montre Hermès honoured this original creation with its “In the Pocket” watch. 

Long before soldiers in the First World War had begun to strap their watch to the wrist; well before the Industrial Revolution ushered in the age of the automobile and aviation that would seal the fate of the pocket watch, horologists had already listened with an attentive ear to women’s wishes. It would be women who would break with conventional watch-wearing and women who would inspire brands’ creativity and imagination. Until mechanical timekeeping became exclusively male territory in the twentieth century; somewhat forgetful of watchmaking’s rich feminine past.