Innovation in Communications — Louis François Clément Bréguet

Louis François Clément Bréguet followed his interest in the science to retool the family watchmaking business into a leading manufacturer of electrical and communications devices. Bréguet’s grandfather was an innovative designer of clocks who counted both Marie Antoinette and Napoleon Bonaparte among his customers. As a young man, Louis Bréguet trained as an apprentice to work in the family business, but his real interest was in the scientific advances being made in the in the area of electromagnetics by Ampère and Arago, a family friend. When his grandfather retired Louis took the business in new directions, first building specialized experimental apparatus and, later, into the manufacture of electrical devices and timekeeping and communications equipment.

In 1842, Louis Bréguet won a competition to update the French telegraph system. First constructed in 1792, the French telegraph system relied on a system of wooden towers fitted with arms that could be raised and lowered to relay messages by semaphore. This was long before the American inventor Samuel Morse introduced the idea of sending messages over a wire using electrical pulses. When the advantages of electrical telegraphy became clear, the French telegraphy service insisted on using a device that visually indicated the letters being transmitted. After a series of trials, Bréguet’s design for a dial indicator was adopted as the standard telegraph device in France. Later, Japan adopted Bréguet’s apparatus, modified for Japanese characters. However, Morse’s telegraphic system, based on representing letters by different combinations of long and short electrical pulses, eventually won out, and France dropped Bréguet’s design in 1855.

Louis Bréguet is one of the 72 engineers and scientists named on the Eiffel Tower.