Born in 1929, Roger Tallon is one of France's foremost industrial designers and his highly engineered designs are both materially and structurally innovative.

Roger Tallon studied electrical engineering in Paris from 1947 to 1949 and then worked as a designer at Studio Avas from 1951 to 1953. He met the industrial designer and theoretician Jacques Viénot (1893--1959) in 1953, and subsequently joined the design consultancy Technès, where he became manager of research in 1960.

While there, Tallon designed numerous innovative products, including cameras for SEM (1957 & 1961), a typewriter for Japy (1960), a portable television for Téléavia (1963), the Module 400 furniture range (1964) and a polished aluminium modular spiral staircase for Lacloche (1966), drinking glasses for Daum (1970) and the Chronograph X watch for LIP (1973). He also worked as a consultant designing Frigidaire refrigerators for General Motors from 1957 to 1964. He began teaching at ENSAD (École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs) in 1963 and established the multi-disciplinary design consultancy, Design Programmes SA in 1973. During the late 1960s and 1970s, Tallon acquired an international repu-tation for his transportation design, which included work for Mexico City's underground system (1969) and the Corail locomotive (1977) for SNCF.

In the watch world, Tallon is famous for his designs he did for the French LIP company. He is to LIP what Richard Arbib was to Hamilton --- responsible for some really innovative case designs. His designs, for ladies and mens watches, appeared on both mechanical and electric LIP watches.

Below are pictures of my recently aquired LIP Mach 2000 designed by Tallon. I'd been looking out for a Tallon-designed LIP for some time but they are much sought after by collectors and tend to fetch a lot of money, but this one was obtained at a reasonable price.

The case is some type of base metal with a black PVD type coating with a steel screw down back, the strap is rubber and the movement is the LIP R 184 Datolip.