The present piece is unusual for its mechanism, featuring a pull string. It was intended to be hung by its ring from the wearer?s clothing, thus registering each of his steps. The outside scale shows the steps up to 100; the intermediate one measures up to 6,000 steps; and the inner scale shows the cumulative distance covered, up to 360,000 steps. A ?mille? was a traditional unit of measurement representing one thousand steps. A virtually identical pedometer from the Ernest Borel collection in Neuchatel was at one time wrongly described as English-made and was illustrated by Alfred Chapuis and Eugene Jaquet in ?La Montre Automatique Ancienne, un Siecle et demie d?histoire?, Neuchatel, 1952, p.93, fig. 117-118. The present lot was previously sold by Antiquorum Geneva, on April 25, 1999, lot 83.