If you were an agrarian farmer living in the Jura Mountains in the 19th century, what would you do when winter came? The answer to that is the very heart of how Swiss watchmaking was born. Isolated and unable to work the land in the cold, these farmers in the Vallée de Joux would hunker down indoors and work the forge. Metallurgy and smithing were the seasonal trade, and from this mastery of metalworking came the design and production of the tiny parts that constitute a timepiece. That inventiveness, just the start of much more, is the core of Valley of Inventions, the latest exhibition in Shanghai by Jaeger-LeCoultre.
The story of this Swiss brand is one of two families: that of pioneering French watchmaker Edmond Jaeger, and Swiss inventor and watchmaker Antoine LeCoultre. LeCoultre set up the Vallée de Joux’s first manufacture in 1833, bringing together disparate craftspersons—those farmers working separately to create different parts—under the one roof of his family barn. As the operation grew and LeCoultre brought more people into his enterprise, the size of the premises gave rise to a nickname that’s stuck: la grande maison.
Edmond Jaeger, meanwhile, was a renown watchmaker who supplied the French Navy. He encountered and first partnered with the LeCoultre manufacture in 1903 thanks to a project to build one of the world’s thinnest pocket watches at the time. The two would work together beyond this project, partnering to supply luxury clients like Cartier, and by 1937 the Jaeger and LeCoultre names—each a horological powerhouse in its own right—were joined for good.
As a joined force, the Jaeger-LeCoultre manufacture and brand is perhaps the most prolific fine watchmaker in the world. It can boast, in its nearly two-century history, of inventing and producing no fewer than 1,400 unique calibres. It has over 430 patented inventions. It houses and perpetuates today 82 ateliers, 108 crafts, 235 techniques, and 69 signature techniques that go into watchmaking. Counting the exact number of watches and timepieces Jaeger-LeCoultre has ever worked on or produced might be impossible—not least because this respected manufacture used to produce and supply movements to virtually every other major Swiss watch brand.
In Shanghai, the story unfolds at the Zhangyuan shikumen compound. Jaeger-LeCoultre has transformed the fourth west unit into a Swiss chalet-style space, and staged the Valley of Inventions in four chapters. The crux of the exhibition is precision, the value and quality held most closely in watchmaking. The first chapter explores chronometry, the practice of crafting certifiably accurate timepieces; the second reveals the tourbillon, a regulating feature introduced to counter the effects of gravity; the third explores the Jaeger-LeCoultre specialty of multi-axis tourbillons, which builds on the innovations of the latter; and the final chapter closes the show on complications, the addition of functions and features beyond time to a watch.
On show are archival and historical timepieces, but what helped illustrate that the precision and heritage of this maison isn’t just a fact of the past were modern and even newly launched models. In the first chapter on chronometry, for instance, Jaeger-LeCoultre proudly showed off its new Master Control Chronometre collection of slender, high-precision, integrated bracelet watches.
Launched this year, and fronted by ambassadors like Kim Woobin and Robert Pattinson, this new collection represents a distillation of and return to the brand’s essential watchmaking expertise.
The second chapter on tourbillons is anchored by the newly launched Master Hybris Artistica Calibre 945. In this superlative model, Jaeger-LeCoultre has moved beyond the utility of a tourbillon to accuracy, and gone a step further into artistry for its own sake. This watch is equipped with a flying cosmotourbillon, that measures not the 24-hours of civil time, but sidereal time: 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds, a length of time based on the Earth’s rotation relative to the stars instead of the Sun.
To supplement the third chapter on multi-axis tourbillons, Jaeger-LeCoultre had on hand the cutting-edge Master Hybris Inventiva Gyrotourbillon à Stratosphère. Unveiled in April this year, this spectacularly complex model features a triple-axis tourbillon that turns and twirls on enough axes to almost entirely negate gravity’s effect on timekeeping accuracy.
And, for the last chapter on complications, the Swiss watchmaker brought out one of the most complex and challenging to create: chiming watches. The Duometre Grande Complication à Grande Sonnerie is equipped with 15 complications, among them the grand sonnerie with four gongs and four hammers to chime and tell the time by sound. Typically, chiming watches are activated with a sliding mechanism—the movement of that slide translating to and transferring power to the movement needed to ring those gongs and hammers.
The chiming complication on this watch, however, is activated by a pusher button—a tiny amount of travel compared to a slide, and nowhere near as effective as a source of energy. To counter this, Jaeger-LeCoultre developed the Duometre movement technology: two barrels that supply two independent sources of power, so the watch can keep its timekeeping accuracy going without interruption whenever additional complications are activated.
Its extreme complexity explains its rarity (just one pièce-unique of this design has been made). Some 1,300 tiny parts that fit, in the end, on a wrist; a full year’s work for a craftsman to assemble and regulate; and 16,000 different operations required in the process. It’s inventiveness of a kind that can scarcely be matched.
Even as Jaeger-LeCoultre charges into the future with these (dare we say) extreme examples of watchmaking, there are still inventions from the past that have quite simply never been beaten. That’s the case of the absolutely tiny 101 movement, launched in 1929—around two decades before the first computer was ever even made. The calibre 101 was and remains the world’s smallest manually-wound mechanical watch movement, and its scale is remarkable to think about. It is only 14mm long, and weighs one gram. There are species of butterfly that are heavier than this mechanical watch movement.
It’s said that the extreme specificity of the calibre 101 calls for very skilled and particular watchmakers to create and service. That’s the reason why Jaeger-LeCoultre reserves it for high jewellery designs, especially on secret watches, to maximise this most discreet of movements. Case in point: the new 101 Secrets in pink gold, set with a graduated design of pink sapphires and diamonds. The 101 Secrets hides its dial under a spring-loaded cover, activated by pressing on a diamond button so seamlessly integrated that it is almost—just almost!—all too easy to miss.
Jaeger-LeCoultre’s The Valley of Inventions runs from 10 to 23 September 2026 at Zhang Yuan W4, Lane 188, Maoming North Road, Jing’an District, Shanghai.
