The Zenith El Primero was a leading act in watchmaking’s greatest drama. When it was launched 56 years ago, on January 10, 1969, Zenith-Movado (as the company was known at the time) had spent seven long years developing the movement that would power the first high-frequency (36,000 vibrations per hour) automatic chronograph on the market. So, it’s an understatement to say it was a bitter disappointment when later that same year, Seiko upended the entire watchmaking industry with the world’s first quartz watch, which made watchmaking both cheap and extraordinarily accurate. It heralded the beginning of the quartz crisis that almost wiped Swiss watchmaking off the map. By 1974, Zenith (which had been sold to the Zenith Radio Corporation in 1971) stopped making the El Primero. Little did it know at the time, that the watch would one day be responsible for reviving the mechanical watch market.
Thanks to one of Zenith’s watchmakers with extraordinary foresight, the El Primero was safeguarded for future keeping. Charles Vermot recognized the importance of the automatic chronograph movement and hid away the tools and blueprints in an attic in Zenith’s manufacture (still preserved today) in 1976. Soon after, in the early ‘80s, Ebel and Rolex came calling for the automatic chronograph movement. Rolex singed a 10-year contract with Zenith to equip its Daytona—know the most valuable watch in the Crown’s catalog—with the El Primero movement. The first Daytonas wit
Just two years before that, Zenith began using the El Primero again in its own collections starting with the Zenith Chronomaster collection and has since continued to capitalize on its claim to fame. In 2019, the company released three limited-edition retro remakes of the El Primero to much fanfare and others have since followed, but the movement lives on other more modern iterations including this recently released El Primero titanium model. But the caliber itself will always remain “the first" leader in watchmaking’s rebirth.
From the article by Allen Farmelo, Paige Reddinger, Victoria Gomelsky, Oren Hartov, Blake Buettner
