It is very unusual to find a coach watch in its original traveling case, which was hinged so that it could be opened to view the time during the journey. Julien Le Roy (1686-1759). Is one of the clockmakers who have contributed most to the progress and the reputation of French watch- and clock-making. Born in Tours on August 6, 1686, he came to Paris in 1699 and was received master in 1713. The following year he married Jeanne Lafons and established himself in the rue du Harlay. First member, then Director of the Société des Arts, he improved almost all branches of clockmaking, and many important inventions in the realm of time-measurement are owed to him. In 1717, Julien Le Roy presented an equation clock to the Royal Academy of Sciences which showed the true time, the place of the sun and its declination. Appointed Clockmaker to the King in 1739, he had his private quarters in the Louvre. His inventions concerned, among other things, turret clocks, equation-clocks, and pull-repeat mechanisms which, previously hidden under the dial, were arranged on the back plate so as to make them more accessible and ensure easier adjustment and maintenance. He developed a double anchor escapement, with dimensions suitable for making the vibrations isochronic, by making the arms the same length as the radius of the wheel. However, his most important discoveries concerned watch mechanisms. The adjustable potence for the verge escape wheel considerably improved the escapement?s functioning, and the steel end-piece (coqueret) which allowed oil to be retained in the balance pivots in order to diminish frictional force, was quickly adopted by other watchmakers. The inventor of dumb repeating watches, in 1740 he created a new arrangement which allowed the area allotted to the repeating work to be enlarged. This invention, called "à bâte levée", was also adopted by his fellow clockmakers. In 1755 he invented a small anchor escapement used as a regulator for the repeating train. He contributed to the Encyclopédie by writing several articles on clock-making together with his son Jean-Baptiste, the Academician. This watch shows many of the characteristics of those watches made in Friedberg for other makers across Europe. Friedberg watchmakers specialized in the production of repeating and striking watches. From the beginning of the 18th century, they were making watches and coach watches with quarter, half quarter and even minute repeating mechanisms and selling them all over Europe. The cases, often of very high quality, were produced in Augsburg and the movements were made in the style of the country for which they were destined. Some of them were signed by their makers, some bear signatures of eminent French and English makers (perhaps at their request, when they were retailing them), still others bear the signature of their makers, written backwards, together with the names of cities in which they were intended to be sold. Until the recent discovery of a large quantity of ebauches, blancs and completed movements which had never been cased, and their study by serious specialists such as Sebastian Whitestone, these watches were wrongly attributed to unrecorded makers from different European countries.