A Short History of Bergeon: Why the Tools in Your Kit Have Numbers

Ask a watchmaker anywhere in the world for a movement holder and they will not say movement holder. They will say four-oh-four-oh. The tweezers are a seven-oh-two-four, the loupe a four-four-two-two. The numbers belong to Bergeon, a company in Le Locle in the Swiss Jura, and they are so widely used that they have become the language of the bench. Four of the tools in the Calibre Learning Kit carry them. This is the fourth of our short brand histories, and it is about the company that made the tools rather than the watches.

A winter trade

Bergeon dates its origins to 1791, but the man who founded it was not called Bergeon. He was Frédéric Faure, and the business he started in Le Locle grew out of the way watchmaking worked in the Jura at the time. Farmers in the high valleys, snowed in for months, made watch parts at home through the winter and sold them in spring. Some of them found they were better at making the tools than at making the watches. Faure's firm became Faure Frères in 1838 and passed to Philippe Faure in 1881. Jules Bergeon joined in 1911, took over the leadership in 1923 with three partners, and in 1927 simplified the name to Bergeon & Cie. Marcel Bergeon ran it from 1941 and his son Pierre joined in 1959. The family era ended in 1989; Vladimir Zennaro, who had joined the company in 1986, became its director in 2005 and is today its principal shareholder.

Le Locle, incidentally, is the same town where Zenith hid its chronograph tooling in an attic, a story we tell elsewhere on this blog. It is a small place with a great deal of horology in it.

The yellow catalogue

What made Bergeon indispensable was not any single tool. It was the catalogue. From early on the company acted as much as a curator as a maker, gathering the best tools from dozens of small Jura workshops, giving each a number, and publishing the lot in a thick yellow book that every watch school, service centre and independent bench came to own. Today that catalogue runs to something like fifteen thousand references, with eighty to a hundred new ones a year, sold through about three thousand Swiss customers and four hundred distributors in more than a hundred countries. Roughly ninety per cent of the company's business is watchmaking; the rest is jewellery and fine mechanics.

The numbering is the point. When a service manual says use a 5700 to open the case, a technician in Tokyo and one in Toronto reach for the same tool. Standardisation of that kind is rare in a craft, and it is Bergeon's real product.

Maker or distributor?

For much of its history Bergeon made less than a third of its own catalogue and sourced the rest from partner workshops, most of them Swiss. That balance has shifted. By 2016 the company said the majority of its range was developed in-house, and it now claims around three quarters of its products are made in its own factory. That factory moved in 2018 to a new four-thousand-square-metre building in Le Locle's industrial district; the company employs sixty to seventy people there and runs a subsidiary in Hong Kong with an office in Shenzhen. There is a tradition that the artisan who makes the Presto hand-removing tool, one of the company's signature pieces, is known inside the building simply as Madame Presto.

The tools in the kit

Four Bergeon references come with the Calibre Learning Kit, and now that you know why they have numbers, here is what they are.

The 4040 is an adjustable movement holder: a reversible plastic frame with a screw that closes two jaws on the movement's edge, sized to take calibres from about 8¾ to 19 lignes, which covers everything from a small ladies' movement to a large pocket-watch calibre. The Miyota 82S0 sits in it with room to spare. It matters because you should never hold a movement in your fingers while working on it.

The 7024 is a family of stainless-steel, anti-magnetic tweezers, 120 millimetres long, in numbered tip patterns from 1 to 5; number 3 is the fine general-purpose tip most beginners start with. Anti-magnetic is not a luxury: magnetised tweezers pick up screws you did not mean to pick up and, worse, can magnetise a hairspring.

The 4422 is the watchmaker's eyeglass, or loupe, a single lens in a black plastic cone that sits in the eye socket. The kit's version gives roughly four times magnification. It takes a day or two to stop squinting and let the eye relax into it, after which you will wonder how anyone works without one.

The 7965 is a line of knurled stainless-steel screwdrivers, six millimetres in diameter, with colour-coded, replaceable blades in fifteen widths from half a millimetre to three. The kit includes the 1.0 and 1.4 millimetre sizes that fit the 82S0's screws. A watchmaker's screwdriver is not a small version of a household one; the blade is hollow-ground to sit flat in the slot, and the swivelling cap lets you spin it under one finger.

Why professionals insist on it

You can buy cheaper tools that look the same, and for a first project they will mostly work. The difference shows in the details that only matter when something goes wrong: tweezers whose tips meet perfectly and stay that way, screwdriver blades that do not chip and gouge a bridge, a holder that grips without marking. Watchmakers buy Bergeon because it removes one variable from a job that already has too many, and because a tool bought in 1990 still matches the one bought last week. The company says openly that it opposes built-in obsolescence, and there are references in the catalogue that have not changed in decades because nobody has found a way to improve them.

We chose Bergeon for the kit for the same reason. A beginner has enough to learn without also learning to distrust their tools.

Three things people get wrong

Bergeon was not founded by anyone called Bergeon; the founder was Frédéric Faure, and the Bergeon name arrived in 1911. Bergeon does not make everything in its catalogue, and never has; its value is curation and standardisation as much as manufacture. And Dumont, the other famous Jura tweezer maker, is an entirely separate family company in Montignez, founded in 1881; the two are neighbours, not relatives.

Sources and further reading

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