LifeStyle --Montblanc Unveils New 1858 Chronograph Tachymeter Watch

One of the most pervasive themes in watches from today’s top brands is recalling the past in updated, but vintage-inspired, new looks. Such is the case with Montblanc’s newest additions to the 1858 collection. Unveiled today, the new 1858 Chronograph Tachymeter watch, and 1858 Small Seconds watches aptly celebrate some of the brand’s most famed pocket watches of the early 20th century.


You can get all of the technical specs on each of these watches by visiting ATimelyPerspective.com, but here we bring you a look at the inspiration behind the line and at the pinnacle piece in the new unveiling, the 1858 Chronograph Tachymeter.

Montblanc is famous for its top-quality writing instruments, for its leather goods and for its wrist watches. The brand has two Swiss factories where the watches are made and where they undergo extreme testing. One workshop — where the renowned Certified 500 Hours Testing takes place — is in LeLocle. Here, the brand produces the majority of its timepieces.

However, in the sleepy village of Villeret, a few hours from LeLocle, lies the heart and soul of haute horology: the Montblanc-owned Villeret Manufacture– once the famed Minerva watchmaking factory. Founded in 1858 — the eponymous year of the collection — Minerva was renowned throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries for its incredible precision watchmaking.

Originally named H. & C. Robert (after the brothers Charles Ivan Robert and Hyppolite Robert who purchased the factory  and began creating  H. & C. Robert watches), the workshops were soon re-named Minerva, the Roman goddess of reason.  All watches were hand-made according to the highest standards, and the Minerva brand fast became a worldwide name. It was within those storied walls that the brand released the first 1/100oth of a second chronograph pocket watch movement in the late 192o’s and subsequently unveiled pocket watches of excellence in the 1930′s.