First Of All

A veritable cult classic, the Zenith El Primero raised the bar for an entire generation of watchmakers.

Every era, every story and every industry has its rivalries. In our time, we have witnessed Apple versus Samsung, BMW versus Mercedes-Benz, Canon versus Nikon, Sony versus Nintendo… companies are constantly fighting to create the next best thing in their respective playing fields. Likewise, in the watchmaking world, the period before the Quartz Crisis was known as the great chronograph race.

The goal was to create the first self-winding chronograph, which sounds simple in concept but is actually extremely complex in construct. Homologation alone for such a movement would take months of work. Clearly it’s not as easy as sticking an oscillating weight onto the back of the movement. An average chronograph is made up of many additional components and these stand squarely in the way of where the winding gears need to be. So watchmakers had to rethink the entire architecture of the movement to even have a shot at success.

Several firms were known to be involved in the race. There was a consortium of brands made up of big boys like Breitling, Heuer, Hamilton-Buren, and the modules specialist Dubois Depraz. Their movement was the Calibre 11, sometimes known as the Chronomatic. There was Seiko Watch Company working solo halfway across the globe in Japan. And there was Zenith, also working solo, in its workshops in Le Locle.

They had all spent years on research and development, prototyping, testing, regulating and finally, Zenith got to be the first to break the silence. Announcing its revolutionary new product, the El Primero, in January 1969, Zenith held true to the name of the movement, which means ‘the first’ in Esperanto.