Longines Watches: A Complete History and Highlights from the Modern Collection

In 2022, Longines marked 190 years in operation, which means that the Swiss watchmaker’s bicentennial year is just around the corner. In nearly two centuries of continuous operation, Longines has not only been a reliable producer of watches in all kinds of styles for both men and ladies; it has also been responsible for more watchmaking milestones than you probably know. Here we take a look at the remarkable history of Longines watches.

Foundations (1832-1908)

Longines was founded in 1832, originally as Raiguel Jeune et Cie., in the Swiss Jura town of Saint-Imier by Auguste Agassiz and two partners. Agassiz (above, left) became the sole proprietor in 1846 after both partners, attorneys by trade, retired from the watch business, and shortly thereafter, he brought his nephew, an enterprising economist named Ernest Françillon (above, right), into the company. It was Françillon, in 1867, who moved all of the firm’s various watchmaking disciplines — which were scattered throughout dozens of independent workshops called établisseurs — under one roof, to a factory that was situated in a scenic area called “Les Longines” or “The Long Meadows,” thus giving the company its now-familiar name.

In 1889, Francillon registered the famous Longines logo with a winged hourglass — today the world’s oldest unchanged, active logo according to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Among Longines’ many milestones under Françillon’s management were the company’s first in-house movement, Caliber 20A, and its first chronograph movement for hand-held stopwatches, Caliber 20H, which helped Longines establish the longstanding reputation for innovations in sports timing, particular in equestrian sports, that it enjoys to this day. Longines was the Official Timekeeper of the Olympic Games in Athens in 1896, which was the first international Olympics held in modern times. 

Early Wristwatches (1908-1927)

Longines continued expanding its scope of horological complications as the 19th Century gave way to the 20th, and pocket watches eventually yielded the stage to wristwatches in the wake of the First World War. A pocket watch made for a client in the Ottoman Empire (modern-day Turkey) in 1908 featured the first two-time-zone dial, enabling its owner to convert between Turkish and Western time. Longines’ Caliber 13.33Z, installed in a wristwatch in 1913, ushered in the era of the modern chronograph movement, with its ⅕-second accuracy. In 1925, the brand claimed two world’s firsts:  the first wrist chronograph with a flyback function and two independent pushers, and the first wristwatch that indicated a second time zone on its dial; the latter timepiece inspired the Spirit Zulu Time model that debuted in 2022. 

From Aviation to Diving (1927-1960)

With the dawning age of manned flight in the early 20th century also came advances in watchmaking, as aviators required reliable, robust, and legible timepieces that could withstand the rigors of being airborne while also serving as navigational aids. Longines worked with Captain Philip Van Horn Weems of the U.S. Navy, an early proponent of celestial navigation and one of the most influential figures of early aviation, to produce the so-called Weems Second-Setting Watch in 1929. Aimed squarely at pilots, the watch was distinguished by an adjustable seconds hand and a rotatable inner disk that could be synchronized with a radio signal in a cockpit to set the time. Charles Lindbergh, a protegé of Weems, used that timepiece as the basis for his own, more complex idea for a pilot’s watch, which combined the inner rotating 60-second disk, a traditional 12-hour ring, a 180-degree scale, and a rotating 360-degree outer bezel on a single wristwatch that a pilot could use in concert with a sextant to determine his “Hour Angle,” or longitude, to assist in navigation. Longines released the Lindbergh Hour Angle Watch (above) to the public in 1931; it remains in the collection today. Throughout the early 20th Century, Longines watches were fixtures on the wrists and in the cockpits of aviation’s pioneers, including Amelia Earhart, Howard Hughes, and Amy Johnson. Those historical timepieces provided the inspiration for Longines’ modern-day Spirit collection, which debuted in 2020. During World War II, Longines produced distinctively styled watches for military pilots under the umbrella of “Avigation” — a portmanteau of “aviation” and “navigation” — including the Avigation BigEye Chronograph, a modern version of which joined the Heritage collection in 2017. (Check out Teddy's review of the Avigation BigEye here.)

Longines continued making advancements in chronograph technology throughout the 1930s and ‘40s. Its Caliber 13ZN from 1936, with a patented flyback mechanism, was one of the most technically advanced of its time. Another patent was filed in 1938 for one of the world’s first waterproof chronographs, equipped with the now-familiar Longines mushroom-shaped pushers. A new evolution of Caliber 13ZN, which debuted in 1942, established a new way to count the elapsed minutes, on the main dial rather than on a subdial. In the 1950s, Longines became one of the first watchmakers to introduce product “families,” today a staple of the watch industry; the first was the Conquest collection in 1954, which remains in the Longines portfolio today and gave rise to the HydroConquest subfamily of sporty dive watches. The dressier Flagship collection, also recently reintroduced, followed in 1956. 

Professional and recreational diving were growing pursuits in the 1950s and early 1960s, and Longines was among the many watch manufacturers to respond to it with purpose-built, highly water-resistant watches for underwater use. The Nautilus Skin Diver, which debuted in 1958, was equipped with a patented “compressor” design with a gasket that tightened the case's water resistance as more water pressure was applied. The spirit and design of this groundbreaking model lives on in the Heritage Skin Diver (above).

The following year of 1959 saw the launch of another dive watch, whose 120-meter water resistant case was outfitted with two crowns and housed the Longines Caliber 19AS. The model, in which the second crown operated an inner rotating dive-scale bezel, provided the template for today’s popular Legend Diver collection (above). 

Quartz Era & Mechanical Revival (1960-2005)

While Longines never fully abandoned classical mechanical watchmaking, the company was rare among traditional Swiss watch firms in its embrace of the quartz timekeeping technology, spearheaded by Japanese brands like Seiko,  that emerged onto the scene in the late 1960s and exerted an influence over the entire industry throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s. Quartz movements were prized for their accuracy, and Longines had already been pushing the boundaries of timing precision on the mechanical side, introducing its high-frequency Caliber 360, with its 36,000-vph frequency, in 1959, and installing it in the first Longines Ultra-Chron (above) in 1967 — two years before Zenith introduced its El Primero caliber, perhaps the most renowned of high-frequency movements. (A new version of the Ultra-Chron made its debut in 2022.) Longines introduced the Ultra Quartz in 1969, which at the time was the most accurate production wristwatch, following it up with an LCD digital version in 1972 and the ultra-thin analog “Golden Leaf” in 1979.

In 1984, in the throes of what most Swiss watchmakers still refer to as the “Quartz Crisis,” Longines further leaned into the trending technology with the release of the Conquest VHP, the initials standing for “Very High Precision.” A more recent version of the Conquest VHP (above) launched in 2017, outfitted with the ETA-produced Caliber L288.2 (Longines became part of the Swatch Group, which also owns the movement-making giant ETA, in 1983.) The movement — dubbed Caliber L289.2 in its chronograph-equipped version — is notable for its precision of +/- 5 seconds per year, higher than standard quartz calibers; its use of a GPD (gear position detection) system that quickly resets the watch’s hands after an impact or exposure to a magnetic field; and its exceptionally long battery life of nearly five years.

Emerging from the 1990s was the Longines DolceVita, an elegant, rectangular-cased timepiece that takes its aesthetic from a wristwatch the company made in 1927 during the height of the Art Deco movement. Today, the DolceVita, whose array of sizes give it an unmistakable unisex appeal, is most associated with the equestrian sporting events that Longines has been involved with from as early as 1912. The watchmaker became the official timekeeper of thoroughbred racing’s most prestigious event, the Kentucky Derby, in 2011 — adding it to a long list of other equestrian championship events like the Breeder’s Cup and Hamptons Classic — and a Longines DolceVita is often awarded to winning jockeys and trainers. Modern versions of the DolceVita have a ​​softly curved rectangular steel case framing a sharply designed sector dial. The dial combines a silver-brushed outer area with Arabic numerals, thin bar indexes and a railroad minute track, with an inner rectangle with blued sword hands and a tiny date window right above 6 o'clock. The movement is a self-winding ETA-based Caliber 592, usually behind a solid caseback engraved with the winged hourglass logo.

Modern Mastery and Vintage Spirit (2005 to the present)

The Longines Master Collection debuted in 2005, and while watches within that collection feature various elements that call to mind vintage timepieces, Master Collection watches differ from those within the expansive Heritage collection in that none of them trace their design to specific historical predecessors. The watches’ defining features include self-winding mechanical movements in classical round cases; blued leaf hands; hours marked by either Roman numerals or elegant, calligraphic Arabic ones; and a barleycorn textured motif in the dials’ centers. Longines has used the Master Collection as the launch pad for a number of complications, from simple date displays, to moon-phases, to chronographs, to complete calendars, all the way up to models that combine multiple functions, such as the reference pictured below. In 2019, the Longines Master Collection welcomed its first Annual Calendar, a high complication just a notch below a perpetual calendar in its complexity, and priced it well below most others in its category, just shy of $2,500. For the brand’s 190th anniversary, Longines introduced special editions of the Master collection with artisanally engraved dials.

In the 21st Century, Longines continues to offer crowd-pleasing watches that lean heavily into the brand’s extensive archives design-wise while also offering undeniably contemporary appeal in their array of colorways and materials as well as increasingly cutting-edge technology in their movements, both quartz and mechanical. In just the last decade or so, we’ve seen the launch of the historical-aviation-influenced Spirit collection (including the aforementioned Zulu Time GMT models), the revival of both the Flagship and Record families (the latter a historical watch brand that Longines acquired in the early 20th Century; more on it here), the expansion of the Hydroconquest dive watch collection into new sizes and material executions, and perhaps most notably, the retro-stylish revamp of the Conquest series that bring the venerable model back to its basics as an everyday-wear sport-oriented watch with an understated elegance.

Titanium, once a rarity in the Longines portfolio, is increasingly finding its way into more timepieces, including the popular Spirit Titanium Automatic (above), and even the manufacturer’s historical pedigree of innovative movement-making is seeing a slow, quiet revival with proprietary calibers like those inside the dual-time-equipped Spirit Zulu Time models. As it approaches 200 years on the horological scene, Longines still appears to have nowhere to go but up in its dual quests to keep making history while also making lots of new watch enthusiasts.