WORDS
Richard Holt
As we scythe rapidly through the 21st century, it is clear that more and more of our decisions will be made by artificial intelligence, while we are kept entertained by augmented realities. When contemplating this apparent inevitability, it is worth considering a lesson from the past.
Fifty years ago, the mechanical watch was doing well, but it was also done for. Companies were fighting to get quartz watches to market and it was clear battery power was the future, and clockwork would soon be finished. If anybody had tried to tell you the new millennium would see the market not just surviving but exploding into this global giant worth countless billions, you would have laughed them out of the room.
Thankfully there are always people who don’t mind being laughed at. The way that Swiss watchmaking was brought back from the brink is illustrated by one Zenith employee who defied orders to save a prized movement from destruction.
Zenith is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the El Primero movement, a ground-breaking automatic chronograph launched in 1969. The brand was already well known, having seen a Zenith strapped to the wrist of French aviator Louis Blériot when he made the first successful flight across the English Channel in 1909. But the fame of the El Primero surpassed that flight.
The movement was first conceived in 1962 to satisfy a public that was turning away from hand winding. But putting an automatic winding mechanism into a wrist chronograph posed quite a technical challenge. Zenith wanted to get the movement ready for its centenary in 1965. With this deadline, and several other companies also racing to produce automatic chronographs, Zenith could have made the job simpler by adding a chronograph module to an existing movement, but insisted on a fully integrated calibre. Zenith, the company says, ‘Did not wish to adjust, but instead to rethink’.
The movement they finally unveiled operated at 36,000 vibrations per hour, the high frequency giving higher accuracy and allowing the large central seconds hand to break timings into tenths of a second. Zenith proudly gave the movement a name meaning ‘The First’ in Spanish, but there is still some dispute over who really won the race. Zenith made the announcement first, but a consortium including Heuer, Breitling and others got their watches to market first, and a Seiko movement came out later the same year.

But there is no dispute over which movement became the most successful. The El Primero is still being made today – modified and updated, but essentially the same design. Yet this long lifespan may never have come to pass if it had not been for a worker at the Zenith factory in the Swiss mountains who saved it from destruction.
In the early 1970s, Zenith was sold to American administrators who stopped production of all mechanical movements and ordered the destruction of all machinery used to make the El Primero. Workshop manager Charles Vermot wrote to bosses saying: ‘Without being against progress, I note that the world often goes through various cycles. You are wrong to believe that the automatic mechanical chronograph will die out completely. I am thus convinced that your company will one day benefit from the whims and fashions that the world has always known.’
He asked permission for a safe place to store the tools for the manufacture of the El Primero. He got no answer, so under cover of night took the presses, cutting tools and manufacturing plans and hid them in a secluded attic of the Zenith buildings.
Zenith limped on, mostly making watches with bought-in quartz movements. It was losing money and in 1978 the Americans sold it to a Swiss consortium that included a man called Paul Castella, who ran a company specialising in watchmaking tools. Under his leadership, Zenith stopped making watches at all for a while and became a specialist supplier to other brands.
A few years later, Rolex needed a new movement to update its Daytona and came to Zenith for a quote on using the El Primero. This is when Charles Vermot’s act of salvage came in. These were not trifling little tools, but vastly expensive, complicated presses. Without them it is unlikely that restarting production would have been viable. The tooling – filed and labelled with typical Swiss precision – was recommissioned and Zenith was able to quickly get back up to speed making the El Primero. A 10-year contract was signed with Rolex and the first Daytonas with El Primero movements were delivered in 1988.
Zenith started making its own models again, equipped with its own movements, giving it sought-after manufacture status. In the years since, Zenith has built on its reputation as a movement maker, but also as a luxury lifestyle brand – which has, since 1999, belonged to the LVMH stable alongside Tag Heuer and Hublot.
This means adding a little sparkle to the serious watchmaking side. While the El Primero was upgraded – with stop-seconds function and longer power reserve – on the design side, Zenith really cut loose. First there were see-through case backs, then open-worked dials, so you didn’t need to take it off your wrist to admire the movement.
Zenith made technical showcases, such as the Grande Chronomaster XXT Tourbillon, and Perpetual Calendar, in 2004 and 2005. But at the same time they were playful, with the Star Open with its heart-shaped dial opening. Or both playful and technical, like the tourbillon-equipped, heart-adorned Starissime. The innovations have never stopped coming, with watches such as the Defy El Primero 21, which oscillates at 360,000 vibrations per hour, measuring time to 100th of a second. But as watches are no longer primarily tools, they don’t need to take themselves too seriously. So you can buy an El Primero blacked out by Bamford Watch Department, or with a diamond-set bezel.
Nobody knows where the future of watchmaking lies any more than we know how far we will allow the machines to decide where we go on holiday. But no matter what happens to the rest of the world, on current showing, the Zenith El Primero looks good for another half century.