World Premiere: A visit to Breitling's factory

It's 8am and we're rushing off to the airport in Basel on the last day of the BaselWorld Watch and Jewellery Fair. I'm feeling decidedly underaged. Surrounding me are journalists whose years of expertise in timepieces match my youth. And so, determined to not embarrass myself and look like a complete fool before these experts, I make the absolute effort to take in as much knowledge as I can gain from this special invite: the opportunity to be the very first of seven journalists to get to see Breitling's new watch factory, where the manufacture of its first in-house movement, the B01, kicked off on its 125th anniversary. I am quite the lucky fool.

The Basel airport has an advertisement with the Chronomat B01. And security is surprisingly lax; I don't have my passport with me, but it doesn't seem to matter to the guards. All we do is run our bags through security control, and we're getting on board Breitling's plane, a sleek and compact supermachine with beautifully decked out wooden interiors and leather seats. Private jets - it's the only way to travel.

Few are unfamiliar with Breitling. Nearly everyone knows the Navitimer, with its distinctive bezel design and circular tachymeter. Even more are familiar with the Superocean Heritage, its diving timepiece capable to going to depths of thousands of metres. But Breitling itself stands for much more, and its founder Leon Breitling's firm belief in quality remains one of its core principles today.

It's the only watch label that is fully certified by the C.O.S.C, meaning that every single timepiece passes the stringent standards set by the official Swiss chronometer testing institute. It is, in a way, also a clever move to eliminate problems with timepieces by preventing them in the first place. As the old adage goes, prevention is better than cure.

In 1884, Leon Breitling established a workshop in the Jura mountains to create chronographs for scientific purposes. His chronographs had to be extremely accurate, and he eventually moved to the village of Grenschen, specialising in chronograph construction. Five years ago, when the first rumblings from various Swiss movement makers such as ETA suggested that vertical integration within a watch brand might be a wise move, they embarked on building a brand new manufacture practically adjacent to the airport at La Chaux-de-Fonds.