Lépine calibre (movement)

Jean-Antoine Lépine (1720-1814).

French watchmaker and inventor of the calibre that bears his name. Its principal characteristic is to have dispensed with the fusee and to have replaced the top plate and pillars with bridges. This made room for the balance inside rather than on top of the mechanism. The result was a much thinner movement. In a pocket watch, the Lépine or open-face calibre denotes a structure in which the seconds hand is in line with the winding-stem, as opposed to the hunter calibre in which the seconds hand is on an axis from 3 to 9 o'clock, at a right angle to the winding-stem.