Bruce's World of Watches: Lemania

By Bruce Shawkey

Lemania has been called the greatest watch company in the world that you probably never heard of. Well, OK, you probably HAVE heard of them, but I'll bet you didn't know how big and important they were (and still are) in the watch world.

That's because they only advertised their own branded watches from about 1945 to the late 1950s. Prior to this, and after this, they supplied ebauches (unsigned rough movements) to other watch companies which installed them in their own cases. These ebauches consisted mainly of chronographs, but also time-only movements. Lemania, the brand name, became briefly known to the public around 1945 and again in the '60s when they helped build the first automatic chronograph, and also sold their Caliber 321 manual wind movement that went into Omega's famous Speedmaster "Moon Watch." Then, Lemania once again faded into obscurity, eventually acquired by Swatch Group in 1981, where their movements go into Swatch Group's various brands. As far as I'm aware, the Lemania name is not seen on any watches, which would account for why so many people are unfamiliar with the brand.

Founded in 1884

Lemania was originally founded as "Lugrin SA" in 1884 by Alfred Lugrin (left) in the Swiss Canton of Vaud. The company name remained Lugrin SA until 1928 when Lugrin's son-in-law, Marius Meylan, registered the name "Lemania Watch Co." which comes from "Lac Leman," a Francophile term for Lake Geneva.

Their specialty was complications, chronograph movements, long-running movements, repeaters and, yes, a few time-only movements. They sold these movements to other companies as mentioned earlier. By 1928, Lemania certainly could have come out of the shadows and sold watches bearing their own brand name, but this was not a good time to be spending the extra money necessary to mount such a campaign. The world was falling into the grip of the Great Depression. So the company stayed with being an ebauche supplier.

That changed toward the end of WW2 when they supplied an Ordnance watch (right) for the British armed forces that became part of the so-called “Dirty Dozen”. They also at that time began supplying branded civilian watches to meet the pent-up demand caused by war-time shortages and also continued supplying other companies with ebauches. That way Lemania would boost brand recognition and profit. This new approach can be seen in advertisements in the trade and consumer publications of the time (below).

This strategy worked for a while as we can see in watches from the era bearing the Lemania name (below).

Here are some additional images of Lemania watches through the decades:

1955

But Lemania slipped back into obscurity with a few branded watches appearing now and then:

Then, Lemania supplied Omega with the manual wind Caliber 321 that went into the famous Speedmaster Professional. As most know, this is the watch that astronauts wore (and still wear) for manned space missions and eventually to the moon, earning the nickname "Moon Watch" and giving Lemania name recognition, at least among collectors. It is said this movement has the longest continuous production run of ANY watch, ever.

Around the same time, interest was growing in an automatic chronograph. No manufacturer wanted to bear the cost alone of designing and building such a movement. So Lemania joined several other manufacturers to design and build a movement that was eventually released in 1969 and was used (and still is) by several companies, including Heuer, Breitling, and Hamilton. Omega uses it too, but it didn't gain approval by NASA for space missions because the movement won't sufficiently wind itself in zero gravity. In any event, the automatic chronograph gave Lemania some added name recognition, at least among watch aficionados.

Lemania continued to supply signed Ordnance watches well into the ‘60s and ‘70s to armed forces of various countries, including Britain, Australia, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Russia, South Africa and Sweden.

As stated earlier, Lemania was acquired in 1981 by Nicolas Hayek, whose various purchases would eventually become Swatch Group. The brand name may have disappeared, but their movements live on in many of Swatch's brands.

Here is another article I wrote about Lemania:

When you talk about Lemania, you're talking about chronographs. Yes, they made some very nice branded time-only watches in the '50s and '60s. But from the beginning, they were selling their in-house chronograph movements to other companies who usurped the glory by putting their names on the dials ... Breguet, Vacheron, Breitling, and Patek Philippe, to name a few. But inside, it was Lemania doing all the work.

Lemania also enjoys the distinction of powering the Omega watches worn by Neil Armstrong and Edwin Eugene "Buzz" Aldrin Jr. when they became the first and second men to set foot on the moon as part NASA's Apollo 11 space mission. So let's take a closer look at this relatively unknown company (to the general public, at least) with a giant reputation in the watch community.

The company was founded in Le Sentier (Switzerland) as Lugrin SA in 1883 by Alfred Lugrin (1858-1920), a largely self-taught watchmaker who, from the beginning, specialized in making complicated watches (chronographs, repeaters, long-running movements, and erotic automaton). It is said that Lugrin honed his craft by working as a laborer at Antoine LeCoultre's factory in Le Sentier (later Jaeger-LeCoultre). The company did not become Lemania until 1928, but more on this later. Lugrin's reputation grew, and he received his first official recognition at exhibitions in Milan in 1906, and later in Bern in 1914.

Circa 1915 Lemania

As is the case with many watch companies, we don't know exactly when the first Lugrin movement found its way into a wrist watch case. The earliest wrist watch I can find appears circa 1915 (right), with unsigned dial, and housed in a Borgel case. No doubt it was cased and sold by a jeweler.

Upon Lugrin's death in 1920, his

Early ad for Lemania

son-in-law Marius Meylan, took over the firm and in 1928 changed the brand name to Lemania Watch Co., reportedly named for Lake Geneva (Lac Leman in French). For reasons unknown, Meylan moved headquarters to L'Orient. An early ad (left) emphasizes that Lemania was a supplier of watch movements and parts (fournitures), not finished watches.

It was not a good time to try and re-boot a watch company. With a worldwide depression looming, many watch companies consolidated, and Lemania joined forces with Omega (still a relatively small independent company at the time) and Tissot to form Société Suisse pour l'Industrie Horlogère, more commonly known as SSIH. Lemania continued to operate in the shadows, supplying most of the chronograph movements that Tissot and Omega would use for the next 40 years, in addition to supplying other companies mentioned earlier.

15TL (left) and 15CHT
(classicwatch.com used with permission)

Lemania prospered during WWII, supplying chronograph movements to both Allied and
German forces. The workhorse movements were arguably the Caliber 15TL, a 2-register, 2-button movement introduced back in 1930s, and the 15CHT, a sister movement to the 15TL that has a single pusher.

The 15CHT found service in a specialized Ordnance watch engraved “HS9” on the back, issued to the British Royal Navy between 1945 and 1950. HS stood for Hydrographic Survey, which involved mapping harbors and waterways. The 9 was its watch specification number which stood for chronograph. It is especially prized among today's chronograph and military watch collectors.

Lemania General Service Watch

A general service Lemania (time only) supplied to British military, using their Caliber 27A movement, is also worthy of mention (right). It is one watch comprising the so-called "Dirty Dozen," a term coined by modern-day military watch collectors to denote all the general service watches commissioned by the British Ministry of Defense (MoD) from various suppliers during World War II. To collect all 12 is considered a Holy Grail achievement among vintage watch collectors. In case you have lived in a cave all your life, the "Dirty Dozen" refers to a classic 1960s WWII movie starring Lee Marvin.

Additional Lemania Calibers are found in other Ordnance watches, too (both during and after WWII), but I admit I am not a military watch expert, as this is a separate genre of watch collecting with collectors and historians more knowledgeable than myself. If this is your ballgame, I encourage you to read and join any number of Internet chat groups and websites devoted to military watches to avoid getting stung. This is a high stakes game, and it is also a minefield of "Frankenwatches" (cobbled together with often real but not necessarily correct parts and/or engraved with phony Ordnance markings) and outright forgeries.

CH27 C12, Omega 321

Of all the chronograph movements that Lemania made, none is more famous than the Caliber CH27 C12, rolled out in 1946. It was the built upon the CH27, introduced five years earlier in 1941. The CH27 C12 added a 12-hour counter to the 2-register CH27. If you haven't guessed already, it's the movement that Omega used (their Caliber 321) in the Omega Speedmaster Professional that accompanied NASA astronauts to the moon (left).

Post-WWII ads for Branded Lemania
(click to see bigger size)

The 1950s were interesting times for Lemania. With pent-up demand for consumer goods brought on from WWII, Lemania decided to jump into its own branded watches, manual wind, automatics and chronographs. From what I've seen on the market, they were very well built watches. Advertisements (right) and watch images appear below (click on the small images to see them full size).

Lemania branded watches 1950s-'60s

And Lemania continued to supply Ordnance watches (chronographs and time-only) to various countries, for the next 40 or so years. This last statement is a very broad brush stroke that covers what could be an entire book. So if this interests you, I again urge you to join an Internet chat group (or 2 or 3, or dozen!) to get more information before you spend big dollars and get stung.

In 1961, Lemania released the Caliber 1872, a manual-wind, 2-register chronograph that uses a different mechanism to control the chronograph functions called cam switching. In this system, a stack of various-shaped plates (cams) operate the assorted levers required to engage and disengage start, stop, and reset of the chronograph counters. Cams are simpler and less expensive to manufacture than the traditional column-wheel system.

A third, 12-hour counter, was added a couple of years later to make the Lemania Caliber 1873 which was also used in later Omega Speedmaster Professionals as the Omega Caliber 861. A third Caliber, the Omega 1861, introduced in 1996, is just an 861 that has been rhodium plated. All other factors being equal, the 321 is the more desirable movement because it was first, and there were fewer of them made, though collectors say it is more complicated to service and maintain than the 861/1861.

Lemania then worked with Omega to develop a high-quality cam switching automatic chronograph, launching their Cal. 1340 in 1972. This was followed by the 1974 introduction of

Lemania Caliber 5100

the Lemania Cal. 5100 (right), which became a legendary workhorse of a movement. Made of stamped steel and containing a handful of non-friction plastic parts, it was designed to compete with emerging inexpensive movements from Seiko and others, and to be cheap to assemble and service. Watches with the 5100 looked great from the front, with chronograph minutes on the central axis along with chronograph seconds, giving watches using this movement a distinctive "four-handed" look. But from the back, the 5100 was kind of an “ugly ducking” of a movement, and thus not a good choice for display casebacks. But what it lacked in beauty it made up for in price and reliability. It found service in the popular Sinn Model 140 "Space Chronograph," Tutima (all shown below), and others. Perhaps the most unusual Lemania 5100 watch is the Sinn EZM 1, with no subdials at all and the crown and pushers located on the left side of the dial

Sinn model 140 Space Chronograph, first automatic chronograph worn in space; Tutima TL Nato Chronograph; Sinn EZM 1, with crown and pushers on left side of dial. All three using the Lemania 5100. Extra crown on the Sinn 140 turns an inner bezel ring.

It’s a kind of cult classic among Sinn collectors. But with timing capability of only 1 minute, it’s a waste of a good chronograph movement if you ask me.

Quartz (Nouvelle) Lemania

Amid the turmoil of the quartz crises of the 1970s-'80s, SSIH closed the Lemania factory in 1980. In 1981, a group of investors bought the company from SSIH and resumed activities under the new name of Nouvelle Lemania, though “Lemania” appears by itself on watches from this era (left)). The company continued making mechanical chronographs, but also made complicated mechanical , electronic, and quartz watches, perpetual calendars, minute repeaters, tourbillons, extra-thin calibers, and mechanical time counters for sport and industry.

Things get rather complicated from here, so see if you can keep up:

1982: (Nouvelle) Lemania, takes over Heuer-Leonidas.

1985: The company TAG (Technique d'Avant Garde), a holding company founded in Luxembourg in 1977 by the Saudi-Syrian businessman Akram Ojjeh (1918-1991), buys (Nouvelle) Lemania and Heuer-Leonidas to create Tag Heuer.

1992: Investcorp, a global equity firm specializing in luxury goods, and owner of Breguet, buys (Nouvelle) Lemania from Tag-Heuer.

1999: The SwatchLemania Group (founded in 1983 by the merger of ASUAG and SSIH) takes over Breguet and (Nouvelle) Lemania from Investcorp.

The Investcorp sale to the Swatch Group in 1999 signaled the death knell for Lemania. Swatch management decreed that the hugely popular Lemania Caliber 5100 was not to be sold outside the Swatch Group. This move by Swatch killed the 5100 movement, with production ending in 2002. Independents who were buying it, such as Sinn and Tutima, stocked up before production ceased, but they eventually had to find a new supplier. Over the next decade, the Lemania name faded and was eventually retired. The Lemania factory was handed over to Breguet, which remains there to this day.

The Lemania name is gone, but not forgotten, especially among collectors and historians of vintage watches. Many of today's mechanical chronograph movements can trace their roots to Lemania Calibers made 60, 70, and even 80 years ago.

Here are some previous articles I've written about Lemania: