![]() For one, the watch featured a column wheel chronograph with a tri-compax layout. Thanks to Zenith’s newfound independence, the brand was able to develop a handful of references powered by the El Primero.Īs we’ve said, the El Primero was a watchmaking marvel of its time - and not just for one reason. The resurrection of the El Primero over a decade after its original release shows how far ahead of its time the watch truly was. A couple of years later, the El Primero was back in production. In 1983, thanks to Ebel and Rolex, Zenith fulfilled movement orders with existing old stock. The El Primero was relegated to the shelves, and Zenith watches entered a dark age. If you want to get technical, the El Primero went out of production in 1975, but that was due to Zenith Radio Corporation shifting its focus to quartz. The Seiko caliber 6139 went out of production in 1980 the Chrono-matic Caliber 11, due to a weak rotor and a mainspring with too much strength, needed to be upgraded within a year of its production. While we would never take anything away from the innovations of Seiko and the Chrono-matic group, neither of their movements lasted very long after their 1969 debuts. What’s important is this: the Zenith movement that resulted seven years after the journey began in 1962 is arguably still the best automatic chronograph in its price range decades years later. Whether or not the so-called Chrono-matic group - Hamilton-Buren, Breitling, Heuer, and Dubois-Dupraz - or Seiko actually beat the El Primero to market is not important. One path to clearing confusion is to say that Zenith produced the very first Swiss-made, fully integrated automatic chronograph - the El Primero. No matter how you frame the discussion, the debate over who created the first automatic chronograph is a heated one. And then there was the dark horse from Le Locle: Zenith. In the Far East, Seiko was working on its own version. The main players were a consortium of companies with mutual interests: Heuer, Buren-Hamilton, Breitling and Dubois-Depraz. While the Americans and Russians were racing to put men into space, a different sort of race was going on between watch companies sprinting toward the milestone of the first self-winding, or automatic, chronograph. Imagine a time before quartz watches, when the technology of timekeeping was still springs and gears made in workshops in the Swiss mountains. Welcome to Watches You Should Know, a biweekly column highlighting important or little-known watches with interesting backstories and unexpected influence. ![]()
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