Lemania didn't begin as Lemania that was sixty years later or so. A wunderkind by name of Charles Lugrin who built wooden clocks at home for fun (that's a hobby in Switzerland) wandered off to the Valee de Joux the canton that makes fancy movements. Switzerland divides areas into industry so if you want to make say, manhole covers, you have to lovate there to do that. Not content with making time only movemends, Lugrin opened as the "Lugrin Chronograph and Repeating Watch company, where he made any manner of fancy things under this mandate.

Of course these were all pocketwatches all hndmade. Think wolf teeth gears. You can occasionally see one; look for "Lugrin" on the movement. Most had a mercuric gilt finish.

Lugrin won a lot of timing competitions with his chronographs and in the 1890s(?) he married into a watchmaking family (the Maylans, long associated with LeCoultre) and his father in law suggested that becuse of his exemplatory showing at the Lac Leman competition that he change the company name to "Lemania" (short A not a long A). Le-MAHN-ee-uh. There were stil no wristwatches. But, there were womens watches, quite small, and some had ribbon straps to be worn on the wrist, and in 1916 the Italian Navy contracted with Ulysse Nardin to make a wrist chronograph. UN contracted with Lemania for the movements. So, the first wristwatch was a Lemania watch (with a stylish UN case).

Now that pocketwatches were dead overight, LWC (Lemania Watch Company) had three chrono wrist movements, the CH13 (the one in the Lawrence of Ariabia watch) which are a very old 13 ligne design. You don't see many of these monopusher babies. Next oldest was the TL-15, which served as military watches durig the way. The Luftwaffe used these. Allied forces used French (Dodaine, Aurecort, Breguet et al) and swiss versions. TL-15 is really a pocketwatch movement but a small one at 37mm. By 1933, mass production and the beginnings of standardized parts (before this each part had to be machine to fit the watch, you could not just put it in) caused a disruption in the industry and consolidataions began. Omega and Lemania merged to form SSI, Tissot joined a year later in 1934. The new (1948?) movement, the 2500 (2530 with incabloc) was, as is the case of the other LWC movemnts used by Omega and Tissot neither of which ever made a chronograph until the 1990s when the Daniels escapement was a thing. Quartz hit. LWC was sold to LVMH and the Breguet brand was restarted to sell LWC movements - movements that can be found in a lot of watches from Hamilton to Patek, AP, Vach, Silberstein and so on.

SSI changed it's name to SSIH.

In the late 1980s, Swtch bought Omega, Tissot, ETA and every case, screw and dial maker around, and the biught the then "Nouvelle Lemania" from LVMH. SSIH was now "The swatch group"

LWC sold a decent number of time only watches with their name and a few chronos too. 6089 or so.

So that's the abbreviated version of the story of the company that invented the modern watch and had the only movement certified to go to the moon - and, all modern Breguet are Lemania. Why use your own name if you can use Louie's? One of the reasons for all this success was more than hard work, it's a question of design. Think about the Daniels escapement for a moment. Daniels showed Pateka nd Rolex, who felt while it was a better design it was too much work for them to implement. A similar thing happened to Lugrin.

Look at any non-LWC chrono movement. See that big lever at the top that goes halfway round the case? It bends! That lever connects the start stop button to the switch inside the movement. It breaks. It warps and degrades timing accuracy if it bends, the lag on the start button is much larger than on the stop button, hence timing errors.

Lugrin took that part out and used a very short rod to do the same thing. This made a massive difference to timing accuracy. All those Olympic Omega timers back in the day? LWC movements. No long levers. REmember who won all the timing contests 30 years prior. In the late sixties or so the Omega CH27=LWC2550 was replaced by the LWC 1373 movement (1878 is 3-reg+Moonphase). Work on the 1300 (Used by Ebel, Omega and others) and 5100 went on the latter being the choice of police and mililtary, ostensibly because of the plastic ring around the movement, making it the toughest watch around. Kick it all you want, don't care.

In the late 1990s LWC informed it's customers of the 5100 that there would be no more, the tooling was worn out. The response from their custmers was "So what retool, we'll pay more, it's not like we can use anything else" so they did. Around I think, the late 70s they brought out a dual barrel very thin movement the 8810; time only, it was used by a lot of watch companies, Longines being about the cheapest. LWC also made a very good alarm movement. So did others from Vulcain to Bulova and others. Even the LeCoultre alarm movements are only accurate to +/- 5 mins, the LWC as used in Omega is the only minute accurate one there is.

As a source of innvation and evolving mechanical timekeepers, Lugrin was as significant in his day as Daniels was in his. There are so far, no Lugrin lemania co-axial watches, but really, how long can that take? Of course the answer is under a year, both Martin Braun and Roger Smith take commissions (Martin played with lots of the, there is one Braun (modern !) cased TL-15 out there somewhere. I passed at $900 and have regretted this pretty much every day of my life.

To quote my watchmaker: "I would never send anybody into space with a Valjoux" (or any other non lwc movement)