A village workshop in a valley that spends five months of the year under snow, and the watch that saved the Swiss industry from itself.
The Vallée de Joux is high, cold and agricultural, and for two hundred years its farmers spent the winter making watch parts. Jules Louis Audemars and Edward Auguste Piguet were two of them. They began working together in Le Brassus in 1875 and formalised the partnership in 1881. A hundred and fifty years later the company is still run by descendants of both families — among the very few of its size that can say so.
For most of that history Audemars Piguet was a maker of complicated watches for other people's names. Then in 1972, with the Swiss industry being taken apart by quartz, it did something that looked like desperation: it launched a stainless steel sports watch, designed overnight by Gérald Genta, and priced it at 3,300 francs — as much as a gold watch and roughly three times a steel Submariner.
The Royal Oak took its name from the Royal Navy ships and the oak that hid Charles II. The often-repeated story that its bezel is a ship's porthole is a myth the company's own archive has corrected: Genta said he was thinking of an old diver's helmet, bolted to its suit, and the eight visible screws follow from where the case screws had to go. It sold slowly at first. It has not been possible to buy one at retail for years.
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