Flipped, Forgotten, Reborn: The Story of the Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso

The patent that René-Alfred Chauvot lodged with the French Ministry of Trade and Industry on 4 March 1931 describes, in flat administrative language, a watch capable of sliding in its support and being completely turned over. Application number 712,868 is a few pages of drawings and claims. It says nothing about polo, nothing about India, and nothing about the two Swiss businessmen who had commissioned it. What it sets out is a case in two parts, a cradle and a swivelling capsule, joined by parallel grooves and held in place by spring-loaded pins. That arrangement has since outlived every commercial assumption ever made about it, including the assumption, held inside Jaeger-LeCoultre itself for the better part of thirty years, that nobody wanted it.

A Game That Travelled from Manipur

The Reverso exists because a British officer in Assam took an interest in a local sport. In the 1850s, Lieutenant Joseph Ford Sherer of the 44th Regiment of Sylhet Light Infantry watched Manipuri horsemen play sagol kangjei, a game whose name translates roughly as horse hockey. Sherer and Captain Robert Stewart took it up themselves, founded the Silchar Kangjai Club in March 1859, and within a few years the earliest written rulebook for what became polo had been drawn up.

The game spread with the officers who played it. By the time it reached the parade grounds and clubs of British India in force, the wristwatch had arrived too, and the two proved incompatible. Wristwatches of the 1920s were fragile things, still regarded by many as an inferior alternative to the pocket watch for anything strenuous. A mallet strike or a fall took the crystal first.

César de Trey and a Commercial Problem

César de Trey was a Swiss businessman who had made his money in dental supplies, specifically in dentures, and who had turned that fortune toward his real interest by opening a watch shop in Lausanne in the 1920s. Visiting India in 1930, he encountered officers who wanted a watch that could survive a chukka. The story, as Jaeger-LeCoultre still tells it, is that they challenged him to solve the problem.

It is worth being clear that this account rests almost entirely on the company's own retelling. There is no surviving order book from a polo club, no signed commission. What is documented is what de Trey did next. He took the problem to Jacques-David LeCoultre, third generation of the family running the manufacture at Le Sentier, which was already working closely with the Parisian house of Edmond Jaeger. Through that connection they engaged Chauvot, a French designer, who filed his patent in March 1931. De Trey bought the rights to the 23-part case design in July of that year, and in November the name Reverso, from the Latin for turning back, was registered.

The Case Nobody Else Could Copy

De Trey and Jacques-David LeCoultre formed Spécialités Horlogères S.A. to market the thing. The arrangement was unusual. Rather than reserving the case for a single brand, Spécialités Horlogères supplied it outward. Between 1931 and 1933, reversible cases went to Patek Philippe, Vacheron Constantin and Cartier, and the Reverso name was also marketed under licence by Hamilton and Favre-Leuba.

The Patek Philippe episode is the most documented. Jacques-David LeCoultre sat as an administrator of Patek Philippe, the two firms having maintained a commercial relationship since 1902, and the Geneva casemaker Wenger delivered eight Reverso cases to Patek between December 1931 and June 1932, four in white gold and four combining white and yellow. Those became the Patek Philippe reference 106. One sits in the Patek Philippe Museum. Another sold at Christie's in 2010 for CHF 147,000.

Cartier took the idea in a different direction with the Cabriolet of 1933, known today as the Tank Basculante, which flipped on a vertical rather than horizontal axis and could rotate a full 360 degrees. It too was patented by Spécialités Horlogères, which is to say that de Trey and LeCoultre held the rights to both of the reversible cases that survived the decade.

The Movement Problem

A rectangular case demands a rectangular movement, and LeCoultre did not have one ready in 1931. The earliest Reverso watches ran on a Tavannes calibre while the manufacture developed its own. The rectangular Calibre 410 arrived in 1933. A version with small seconds at six o'clock followed in 1934. The name Jaeger-LeCoultre came into use in 1937, although the underlying corporate untangling of Jaeger's watchmaking interests would not be completed until 1981.

What Went on the Back

The case back was meant to be a shield. It became a canvas almost immediately. From 1931 onward, Reverso backs were engraved, enamelled, and painted with initials, monograms, coats of arms and miniatures, and the company built a workshop capability around it that no round watch could have justified.

The surviving examples are a strange cross-section of the interwar decades. A 1933 piece commemorates Italo Balbo's transatlantic flight. A 1935 Reverso marks Amelia Earhart's flight from Mexico City to New York. General Douglas MacArthur owned one carrying his initials. A 1936 example bears an enamel miniature portrait of an Indian woman, thought to be a maharani, whose identity Jaeger-LeCoultre has never established. Earhart's and MacArthur's watches are both in the company museum.

Advertising of the period leaned hard on durability rather than elegance. A 1943 campaign presented the Reverso as the ideal army watch on the grounds that it could take knocks. That was the last decade in which the argument worked.

Out of Fashion, Then Out of Production

By the early 1950s the Reverso was finished commercially. Round cases had taken over, and the meaning of a sports watch had changed underneath it. Recreational diving arrived, the Submariner and its competitors defined what a tough watch looked like, and a flat rectangle that hid its dial from mallets answered a question nobody was asking any more. Jaeger-LeCoultre's own records place one of the last first-generation examples in 1952, and the model then disappeared from the catalogues entirely.

What followed was worse than obscurity. Quartz arrived at the end of the 1960s and Jaeger-LeCoultre, like most of the Vallée de Joux, went after it. The company was combined with Favre-Leuba in 1969 and did not prosper. In 1978, short of money, 65 percent of Jaeger-LeCoultre was sold to VDO Schindling, the German automotive instruments group that had just bought IWC. The manufacture that had built the Duoplan, the Atmos and the Calibre 101 was now a line item in an industrial portfolio, and its most distinctive watch had been out of production for a quarter of a century.

Two Hundred Empty Cases

In 1972, Giorgio Corvo, Jaeger-LeCoultre's agent for Italy, was at the manufacture when he came across a cache of around 200 unused Staybrite steel Reverso cases left over from the original run. He asked for them to be completed. The factory demurred, because there was no longer a movement in production that fitted.

Corvo took a case or two back to Italy and gave them to the watchmakers in his after-sales network. After roughly a year of work they built a movement holder that allowed the small oval Calibre 840 to sit inside a case designed in 1931. Jaeger-LeCoultre industrialised the solution and completed the batch. Corvo sold all 200 in Italy within a few months, an appetite that says as much about the Italian market of the early 1970s as it does about the watch.

Accounts differ slightly on the speed of the sell-through, some sources saying a month and others two or three, but the outcome is not in dispute. A distributor had proved there was demand for a watch the manufacture had written off.

Rebuilding, Slowly

Jaeger-LeCoultre moved on the evidence, though not quickly and not confidently. The Reverso returned in the second half of the 1970s aimed at women and powered by quartz. News from the Basel fair in 1979 announced the revival, and the promotional emphasis fell on the quartz Calibre 601 rather than on the return of anything iconic. The illustration used at the fair did not even carry the triple gadroons that define the case.

The uncertainty ran deep enough that the design leaked sideways. Eska, a brand of S. Kocher & Co. that by the late 1970s was assembling watches largely from third-party components, sold a model called the Sesame with the same conical lugs, the same case profile and the same three-stripe motif above and below the dial. Whether Eska bought surplus from the same case supplier or produced an unusually exact copy has never been established. Either way, the signature model of a 150-year-old manufacture was being sold under someone else's name.

Two things changed that. The first was Günter Blümlein, who took charge of Jaeger-LeCoultre and IWC for VDO in 1980 and made the contrarian bet that a market for expensive mechanical watches was reopening. Blümlein bought back Jaeger's watchmaking interests in 1981, resolved the shareholding, and pushed both manufactures toward complications while the rest of the industry chased quartz.

The second was an engineer named Daniel Wild, who was given the job in 1981 of redesigning the Reverso case to modern standards. His version appeared in 1985 as what is now called the Reverso Classique. Chauvot's case had comprised 23 parts, could only be swivelled at the far end of its cradle, and was not water resistant. Wild's ran to 55 parts, pivoted anywhere along the cradle, and sealed. It replaced the short-lived and largely forgotten Reverso II, and every Reverso since descends from it.

Sixty Years, and a Movement in Solid Gold

The moment the Reverso stopped being a revived curiosity and became the centre of the company was 1991. Blümlein and Jaeger-LeCoultre chief executive Henri-John Belmont marked the model's sixtieth anniversary with the Reverso 60ème, also known as the Soixantième, a limited edition of 500 pieces in 18 carat pink gold, reference 270.2.64.

The front showed hours, minutes, date and a power reserve indicator angled into the upper left of the dial, the first complication the Reverso had ever carried. The back, which had spent sixty years as a surface for engraving, now showed the movement. Calibre 824 was hand-wound, 23 jewels, and had its plates and bridges made entirely of solid gold, a specification almost nobody else was offering in 1991.

It also introduced the Grande Taille case, and that was the strategically important part. A larger rectangle could hold things. What followed was a decade of firsts that would have been unthinkable for a watch that had been out of production in living memory. A Reverso tourbillon in 1993. A minute repeater and the twin-dialled Duoface in 1994. A retrograde chronograph in 1996. A perpetual calendar in 2000. By the time the Tryptique arrived in 2006 with complications across three faces, and the Quadriptyque in 2021 with eleven complications across four, the reversible case had been recast from a defensive measure into a display architecture.

Final Thoughts

The usual way to tell this story is as a straight line from a polo field to a modern icon, and it is worth resisting that. The Reverso spent longer out of the catalogue than most watch models exist. It was saved not by the manufacture that invented it but by an Italian distributor who found a box of empty cases and would not let it go, and then by a German manager who read the market against the industry consensus, and then by an engineer who rebuilt the case from 23 parts to 55 so it could survive a life its designer never planned for.

What has held constant is the shape. Chauvot drew a rectangle in 1931 to solve a mechanical problem that ceased to exist within twenty years, and the solution turned out to be better than the problem. The gadroons, the proportions and the blank back have carried the watch through the collapse of Art Deco taste, the collapse of the Swiss mechanical industry and the collapse of Jaeger-LeCoultre's own confidence in it. Not many designs get to be forgotten that thoroughly and still come back as the thing a manufacture is known for.

References

1. Watchonista, "Scrabble the Seconds: The Brains Behind Jaeger-LeCoultre's Reverso", https://www.watchonista.com/articles/history/scrabble-seconds-brains-behind-jaeger-lecoultres-reverso

2. Watches by SJX, "The Story of the World's Most Famous Reversible Watch", 7 December 2021, https://watchesbysjx.com/2021/12/history-jaeger-lecoultre-reverso.html

3. Grail Watch, "The Nadir of Jaeger-LeCoultre and the Reverso", 15 April 2020, https://grail-watch.com/2020/04/15/the-nadir-of-jaeger-lecoultre-and-the-reverso/

4. Time and Watches, "History of the Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso", https://www.timeandwatches.com/p/jaeger-lecoultre-reverso-history.html

5. A Collected Man, "How the Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso Flipped its Script", https://www.acollectedman.com/blogs/journal/history-jaeger-lecoultre-reverso

6. Monochrome Watches, "In-Depth: The History of the Almost Century-Old Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso", https://monochrome-watches.com/history-jaeger-lecoultre-reverso-reversible-watch-1931-in-depth-review/

7. Jaeger-LeCoultre Press, "The Genesis of Reverso", https://press.jaeger-lecoultre.com/the-genesis-of-reverso/

8. Jaeger-LeCoultre Press, "The 1931 Polo Club", https://press.jaeger-lecoultre.com/the-1931-polo-club/

9. Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie, "Reverso, the story of an icon for 90 years", https://www.hautehorlogerie.org/en/watches-and-culture/library/reverso-the-story-of-an-icon-for-90-years

10. Jaeger-LeCoultre, "Reverso Corvo", The Collectibles, https://www.jaeger-lecoultre.com/my-en/watches/collectibles/reverso-corvo-qverev01

11. Christie's, Lot 5309262, Patek Philippe reference 106, https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-5309262

12. Blomman Watch Report, "Jaeger-LeCoultre 1991: Reverso 60th Anniversary 60ème", 12 March 2020, https://blommanwatchreport.com/2020/03/12/jaeger-lecoultre-1991-reverso-60th-anniversary-60eme/