The minute repeater is watchmaking's collective magnum opus. No complication is more beautiful, more revered, or more difficult to master than the repeater. With origins dating back to the late 1600s, the first "dumb" repeaters (those which had hammers striking nothing more than the watch's case) were first popular with those in royal courts. These audible time-tellers allowed the owners to check the time without offending the powers that be. Quickly, the likes of Abraham-Louis Breguet conceived a mechanism that would strike the hours, quarter hours, and minutes not on the case but on a set of coiled wire gongs. Repeaters in this complicated form (think an additional 100 components AT LEAST) were quite expensive, and the complication has long been reserved for the highest level of society and collectors.