On August 16, 2006, Zion Yakubov, a small-time antiquities dealer in Tel Aviv, met with a lawyer representing an anonymous American client who needed some old watches authenticated.  The lawyer handed Yakubov some poorly packed boxes containing 40 old watches, among which a stunned Yakubov found the most famous watch ever made: Abraham-Louis Breguet’s 160, which had been stolen and missing for the last 23 years. 
Two hundred years later, on April 15, 1983, a disgraced former Israeli air force pilot turned career criminal named Na’aman Diller, using homemade tools and cunning plans, robbed the L. A. Mayer Museum of Islamic Art in Katamon, Israel (below). On the morning of the 16th, the guards woke up and realized their museum had been looted of 106 watches, four oil paintings, and three antique books.  They had slept through one of the largest watch thefts in history ? and worst of all, among the $5 million or so of lost items was the Queen.
Biggs, a journalist and the East Coast Editor for TechCrunch, combines meticulous research with deftly woven storylines to detail the rise of Abraham-Louis Breguet from a Swiss-born boy of modest means, whose formal education ended at the age of twelve, to the favored watchmaker of King Louis XVI and Marie. Biggs walks us through the rigorous training and the personal tragedies that shaped Breguet?s early life, then uses his deep knowledge of horology to explain the inventions and innovations that Breguet achieved on hi...