That TAG Heuer shares a long and intricate relationship with the chronograph is a fact well known and a story well documented by many. Almost intuitively today, people associate the brand with sporty timekeepers distilled from the world of automotive racing and designed for everyday wear. Yet what would seem less universally understood is precisely how long and exactly how intricate this relationship is, and more importantly, why has TAG Heuer been so obsessed with this complication that the majority of its 164-year-long history has been devoted to analysing time and creating ever more sophisticated ways to measure it.
Consider the company’s top two most iconic watches of all time. Indisputably, they are the Carrera reference 2447 and the Monaco reference 1133B. These watches were introduced as chronographs first, before time-only versions eventually entered the collections. As well for many horology enthusiasts past and present, the first TAG Heuer timepiece they had ever bought was a chronograph simply because no other complication could be more indelibly linked to TAG Heuer’s core identity as a watchmaker.
When the company released the first Carrera model in 1963 it relied on one of the best performing chronograph movements on the market, the manual-winding Valjoux 72, but for the Monaco in 1969, it went one step further to raise the stakes in precision timekeeping. Naturally this takes us back to the arrival of the world’s first automatic chronograph in 1969 when the company collaborated with a consortium that includes Breitling, Hamilton-Buren and Dubois Depraz, to produce the formidable Monaco caliber 11 with its crown uniquely positioned at nine o’clock. This was a moment forever etched in time.
And a year later when images circulated of Steve McQueen wearing the Monaco 1133B on and around the set of the film Le Mans, that was when the Monaco became an icon. Not to mention what a stroke of design genius it had been for Jack Heuer to have worked with the Swiss case maker Erwin Piquerez on the world’s first square-shaped water resistant chronograph case, securing the Monaco a permanent place in the sports watches hall of fame for all eternity. Indeed, TAG Heuer has come an incredibly long way with the chronograph in every style, shape and configuration.
But the journey continues well into the 21st century, and in an upward trajectory
