Louis Constantin Detouche, the son of Parisian clockmaker Georges Detouche, was born in Paris in 1810. In 1830 he moved his father’s business from rue de Venise to 158-160 rue St. Martin. In 1845, Detouche employed as his chef d’atelier Jacques François Houdin, whose technical virtuosity and invention did much to establish the firm’s reputation, garnering them praise for their ingenuity, patents and highly sophisticated precision movements, compensating pendulums, astronomical complications, and use of electro-mechanical movements. The Maison Detouche, exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851, and many subsequent International and regional exhibitions to much acclaim, winning gold medals at the Exposition Universelle Paris 1855, Besançon 1860, London 1862 and Nimes 1862. Awarded the Danish Croix de l’ordre du Dannebrog, and the French Légion d’honneur in 1853 for his contribution toward the progress in horology that resulted from his work, Detouche was also the official clockmaker to the city of Paris and the Emperor Napoleon III.

Among Detouche’s most celebrated works is one of two spectacular astronomical regulators with fourteen subsidiary dials showing indications of the days, months and dates, sunrise and sunset time, the equation of time, moonrise and moonset, lunar phases, barometer and thermometer, and the time in several cities, which once stood at the corner of the rue Saint-Martin and the rue de Rivoli but is now housed in the showroom of François-Paul Journe SA Manufacture in Geneva.