Dr. N.
Zenith is certainly one of the great names in Swiss watchmaking. Known to most for the El Primero movement, the first automatic chronograph in the world and, according to many, still the best, Zenith has also introduced other important innovations.
Let's find out more about this prestigious manufacturer.
Zenith: the beginnings
We are in 1865, in Le Locle, a town in French-speaking Switzerland. The young Georges-Favre Jacout, just 22 years old, has an innovative idea, destined to transform the Swiss watch industry: centralized manufacturing. What does it mean?
Until that moment, watch production took place through a client who provided financial resources and a form of business organisation. The latter purchases the components from specialized external manufacturers and assembles the watch. He can, if he has the economic strength, impose his own specifications on suppliers; more often, it is the suppliers who create standardized components that more or less everyone uses.
Jacout believes that a more efficient model for building watches would be to centralize the production of the entire product in a single factory, so that all manufacturing phases are under the control of the customer.
The result of this intuition is the birth of centralized manufacturing. Soon, all the other watch companies moved in the same direction: Jacout's intuition changed the watch industry forever.
The caliber 3019, Zenith's greatest success: it is what powers the Primero.
Zenith: the great successes
In the mid-twentieth century, Zenith achieved international fame thanks to its ref. movement. 135, a hand-wound chronometer with seconds in the center. This movement wins over two hundred chronometry awards and remains in production for decades, becoming one of the industry's references.
Zenith's greatest success, however, is the El Primero automatic chronograph caliber, which we covered in this article. Among the three competitors - the other two are Seiko and the Doubois-Depraz consortium, Buren, Breitling and Heuer - who competed in 1969 for the record of the self-winding chronograph, the Zenith El Primero it is undoubtedly the best. Not just because it was presented first. The hiatus between the three automatic chronographs is just a few months, and they all entered the market in 1969. The reason for giving it the primacy lies in its technical refinement and its success: it is the only one of the three to still be in production today . The Seiko philosophy of constantly improving and modifying its product has not in fact allowed the original movement to be preserved unchanged. The competing movement made by the Doubois-Depraz, Buren, Breitling and Heuer consortium, whose most significant exponent is the Heuer Monaco, fell victim to the quartz crisis. Today it is no longer produced.
We must not forget that the Zenith movement was chosen by none other than Rolex for their legendary Daytona 16520, between 1988 and 2000. It is in fact a caliber which, thanks to its compactness, is easily inserted into the Oyster case without the need for modifications. The fact that it took a manufacturer like Rolex twelve years to produce its own self-winding chronograph movement, and that it arrived more than thirty years later than Zenith, is a testament to the extraordinary work that went into creating the Zenith El Primero: the first, and perhaps still the best.
However, Zenith El Primero risked disappearing. In the Seventies, the company was overwhelmed by the Quartz Crisis. The machinery and documents describing the production processes of Primero, which should have been dismantled and sold, were fortunately saved by Charles Vermot, an employee of the company, the second key figure in the history of Zenith. By literally hiding them in the attic of the factory, Vermot managed to preserve from destruction the production tools that would allow the company to relaunch in the XNUMXs, also thanks to the Rolex order.
Zenith today
Zenith still remains a company capable of innovation today. Under the aegis of the LVMH group, it was able to create a technically interesting timepiece like the Zenith Defy El Primero 21 , characterized by the possibility of timing intervals of up to 1 hundredth of a second, unique in the world of watchmaking. Having inserted two balance wheels into a wristwatch, one of which is reserved for the chronograph which oscillates at 360 thousand vibrations per hour, is a truly exceptional result.
Zenith is undoubtedly a watchmaking company that makes technical innovation its hallmark: today as in 1865.
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