There generous assistance enabled him, with his son, to continue his
ingenious experiments in his art. At length, having returned to Paris
after two years' absence, he opened a new establishment, which
continued to flourish till 1823, when France lost this man, the pride
and boast of its industrial class. Bréguet was member of the
Institute, was clockmaker to the navy, and member of the Bureau of
Longitude. He was indeed the most celebrated clockmaker of the age; he
had brought to perfection every branch of his art. Nothing could
surpass the delicacy and ingenuity of his free escapement with a
maintaining power. To him we owe another escapement called 'natural,'
in which there is no spring, and oil is not needed; but another, and
still more perfect one, is the double escapement, where the precision
of the contacts renders the use of oil equally unnecessary, and in
which the waste of power in the pendulum is repaired at each
vibration.

The sea-watches or chronometers of Bréguet are famous throughout the
world. It is well known that these watches are every moment subject to
change of position, from the rolling and pitching of the vessel.
Bréguet conceived the bold thought of enclosing the whole mechanism of
the escapement and the spring in a circular envelope, making a
complete revolution every two minutes. The inequality of position is
thus, as it were, equalised on that short lapse of time; the mechanism
itself producing compensation, whether the chronometer is subjected to
any continuous movement, or kept steady in an inclined or upright
position. Bréguet did still more: he found means to preserve the
regularity of his chronometers even in case of their getting any
sudden shock or fall, and this he did by the parachute. Sir Thomas
Brisbane put one of them to the proof, carrying it about with him on
horseback, and on long journeys and voyages; in sixteen months, the