This year, Revolution turns 20. Two decades of chronicling watches, people and ideas have given us a front-row seat to a remarkable story: how an age-old craft has both preserved its soul and reinvented itself for the 21st century. To celebrate, we’ve chosen over 100 names and milestones that, for us, define the era so far. From leaders to watches, you can see the whole list here.

Major Ernest Schneider stepped away from a successful career in the Swiss military when his father-in-law, the head of watch manufacturing firm Sicura, passed away in the early ’60s. He was in his 40s and entering an all-new world, but Schneider took to watches well. Sicura was one of the few companies that was not severely affected during the Quartz Crisis, thanks to his creativity in the manufacturing of mechanical watches with digital displays and inexpensive but fun sports watches. Schneider was also quick to introduce inexpensive and trendy quartz models to his offer. But mechanical watches had left an imprint on him in the military; he appreciated their purposefulness and their heroic designs. So, in 1979, when one the most famous aviation chronograph brands Breitling came up for sale, Schneider found the perfect mission — to revive it and make it the coolest watch brand of the ’80s and beyond.

In 1980, be bought a white party manufacturer named Kelek and turned this into Breitling’s manufacture. In the ’80s, he relaunched Breitling with three models: the Chronomat, the Aerospace and the Emergency, and it is hard to fully express in words how cool these watches were in the context of the next two decades. He retired to the south of France in 1994, at which point his son Theodore “Teddy” Schneider took over.

Now the hard part about writing this is that Teddy Schneider has made every effort possible to stay out of the public eye. At the Baselworld fair, the only point of contact with Breitling’s top leadership was Schneider’s friend, the former military pilot Jean-Paul Girardin (one of the individuals behind movement manufacture Kenissi). Yet, at the same time, Breitling’s presence in the watch world has been massive, known for its larger-than-life heroic aviation themed timepieces as well for its legendary parties at Baselworld. Swatch Group’s decision to discontinue supplying movements to external brands motivated the creation of Breitling’s in-house chronograph movement, the Caliber B01. Despite having never met him, I felt it still immensely important to include Schneider on this list.

B01 caliber