Over the past few years, Switzerland’s top watch brands have belatedly come to see the importance of not only preserving their heritage, but actively talking about it beyond the confines of their in-house museums and archives. Programmes such as Vacheron Constantin’s Les Collectioneurs have seen brands scour the world for the best examples of their own vintage watches, lovingly restore them, and in bringing them back to the market (with quality and service guarantees normally unknown for vintage watches) raise awareness of the incredible depth on offer in their back catalogues. Now it’s Jaeger-LeCoultre’s turn, with the publication of The Collectibles, a weighty coffee-table tome that celebrates a selection of the maison’s best vintage pieces.

Here at MR PORTER, exclusive online stockist for the beautifully illustrated and informative book, we took the opportunity to dive in and share some fascinating and characterful details from this walk through the history of a true watchmaking titan.

You may know that the famous flap watch was designed in the early 1930s in response to a demand for watches that could survive a polo match unscathed. (Why players didn’t just take their watches off to play a high-intensity contact sport has never been properly explained.)

But you probably didn’t know that the structure of the Swiss watch industry meant that, for the first two years of its production, the Reverso was not the exclusive property of Jaeger-LeCoultre at all. (Technically, this brand name didn’t exist until 1937 either.) What’s more, the very first ones didn’t contain a single Jaeger or LeCoultre part, although they were all assembled at the brand’s factory in Le Sentier.

The Reverso was commissioned at the behest of distributor Mr César de Trey, invented by Mr Rene-Alfred Chauvot and backed by Mr Jacques-David LeCoultre. The revolutionary case was built by case-making specialists Wenger – it being normal to rely on suppliers for such things. But Jaeger-LeCoultre found it lacked a movement that was the correct size for the case, so the earliest models used calibres from now-defunct maker Tavannes.

With LeCoultre’s blessing (he actually sat on the board of directors for Patek Philippe), Wenger was allowed to produce the cases for other watchmakers, resulting in Reverso watches for Cartier, Hamilton, Favre-Leuba and Vacheron Constantin.

Early models bore no brand name on the dial – simply “Reverso”, which de Trey had trademarked. By 1933, the rights had come under the control of Jaeger SA and LeCoultre & Cie, which would merge four years later to make the brand we know today.

Before Omega – even before Breitling, which holds the claim to have sent the first Swiss wristwatch to space, in the form of Mr Scott Carpenter’s Cosmonaute – Jaeger-LeCoultre provided a watch called the Quartermaster to the group of pioneering astronauts known as “the Mercury Seven”.

Assembled and sold exclusively in the US to evade import tariffs, it clearly has military influences in its design, with the 24-hour dial and clear, high-contrast luminous numerals, but information on its creation is scant. It appears that Nasa commissioned a special order for the seven astronauts, creating an edition that removed the applied hour markers in favour of painted dots and swapped the black leather strap for an elasticated steel bracelet.

It was pictured at various occasions on the wrists of Messrs Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom and John Glenn – all of whom went into space ahead of Carpenter – but no definitive evidence exists that they wore it as they ascended. Imagine how different the modern watch landscape might be if Jaeger-LeCoultre had become a brand defined by its space-going exploits.

Watchmaking boomed in the post-war years, and became emblematic of new-found affluence. The industry also wanted to signal that it was keeping up with the times in an era of great technological change. Into this context came the impeccably named Futurematic, a watch Jaeger-LeCoultre touted as “truly self-winding”.

It had an automatic movement – at the time, a development that was still filtering into the mainstream – but its real stroke of genius was a mechanism that would retain a small amount of tension in the mainspring even when the watch appeared to have run out of power. That meant that the next time the owner picked it up, it would resume running immediately.

It was the kind of innovation that foreshadowed the likes of today’s Ressence Type 2, and prompted Jaeger-LeCoultre to remove the watch’s crown altogether, saying that it would never need to be wound. A discreet “setting wheel” was positioned on the rear of the case, to enable you to still adjust the time.

It’s an anachronistic quirk to collectors today, but at the time of its production it was a valuable tool: the Memovox Parking. In fact, this watch was considered important enough to be part of Jaeger-LeCoultre’s jubilee collection, launched in 1958 to celebrate its 125th anniversary.

Also featuring the Memovox International, a world-time version, and the anti-magnetic Geophysic, the collection spoke of a watch brand equipping its customers for a modern, rapidly changing world of scientific advancement and jet-set travel. But the relatively mundane activity of running up parking charges was significant enough to feature in the same set.

Adjustable for times of 30 minutes, one hour, 90 minutes and two hours, the design and the technical solution (a modification to the Memovox’s central rotating disc, which showed the alarm function) were patented in 1957.

One aspect of its history that the brand regularly returns to in the book is the origin of its model names. Latin derivations are particularly common, as in the case of the Reverso and Memovox, and when the 1960s brought demand for burlier dive watches and chronographs, the marketing turned to more macho associations: the Master Mariner, the Barracuda and the Shark all make an appearance.

The one that really stood out to us – mostly because by the brand’s own admission; no one really knows where the idea came from – is the Memovox Snowdrop. A lug-less design with a single-piece case and smooth like a river-washed pebble, the Snowdrop was part of the last generation of the Memovox, introduced in 1970 and only produced for two years.

In the book’s words, “There are no documents in the archives to explain this choice of name for Reference E 877. It is however conceivable that ‘Snowdrop’ was chosen because it refers to a flower found in the Vallee de Joux, where the Manufacture is located, and that announces spring, the awakening of nature, and sunny days.”