It might be a bit of a stretch, but not much, to say that if it weren’t for the watch company Breguet, there might be no Air France. And commercial air travel might be a bit different, too.
The route between the founding of Breguet watches in 1775 on the Quai de l’Horloge in Paris and air travel as we know it today has been circuitous. But it principally involves Louis Charles Breguet, a great-great-grandson of the founder, Abraham-Louis Breguet.
Given the family’s background in the watch business, Louis Charles grew up exposed to mechanical and electrical systems. He was also fascinated with the idea of flying. “Like other young boys at the time, he loved reading Jules Verne,” said Emmanuel Breguet, one of his grandsons who now is a vice president and head of patrimony at the watch company. (Emmanuel said he never met his grandfather, but he wrote a book about his life and the planes his company made, “Breguet: A Century of Aviation.”)
Early in Louis Charles’s career as an electrical engineer, he experimented with machines such as a gyroplane, which had spinning blades and got a couple of feet off the ground in 1907 (a precursor to his version of the helicopter that he made about 25 years later).
And in 1911, he started an aviation company that supplied airplanes to the French military when World War I began three years later.
