1969: The Race for the First Automatic Chronograph, and the Man Who Hid the Tools in the Attic

By the 1960s the mechanical watch industry had one obvious thing left to do. Automatic watches had been mainstream since the 1940s. Chronographs, watches with a built-in stopwatch, had existed since the nineteenth century. Nobody had managed to combine them. A chronograph needs a thick, complicated module on top of the movement; an automatic needs a rotor on top of that; and the result was too tall for a wristwatch, or too weak to wind itself, or both. Whoever solved it first would own the decade. This is the fifth of our stories from watchmaking.

Three teams

In Le Locle, Zenith began work in 1962, planning to unveil a fully integrated automatic chronograph, designed as one movement rather than a stack of modules, for the company's centenary in 1965. It missed by four years. The result, calibre 3019 PHC, ran at 36,000 vibrations per hour, ten ticks a second, which allowed it to time to a tenth; it used a column wheel, the traditional and elegant way to control the start, stop and reset; and it was 6.5 millimetres thick, with 282 parts. Zenith called it El Primero. The first.

In Switzerland's Jura, a consortium was forming. On 2 February 1966 Heuer-Léonidas, Breitling, the movement maker Büren and the specialist Dubois Dépraz signed an agreement code-named Project 99. Their approach was modular: take Büren's slim micro-rotor automatic, in which the winding weight sits inside the movement rather than on top of it, and bolt a Dubois Dépraz chronograph module to the dial side. The result, Calibre 11, ran at a leisurely 19,800 vph, and because the module was on the front, the crown ended up on the left of the case at nine o'clock, a quirk that became a signature.

And in Suwa, Japan, Seiko was building the calibre 6139. It was neither modular nor particularly slim, but it combined two features the Swiss had not: a column wheel and a vertical clutch, which engages the chronograph without the small jump of the seconds hand that horizontal clutches cause. Seiko told nobody.

The announcements

Zenith went first. On 10 January 1969 it announced El Primero to the press. Production, however, was small and slow; the first watches, the A384, A385 and A386, reached shops only towards the end of the year, and early output was in the low thousands.

The consortium went second and went big. On 3 March 1969 it presented the Chronomatic at simultaneous press conferences in Geneva, at five in the afternoon, and in New York, at eleven in the morning, with a hundred samples shown at the Basel fair in April and watches in shops by summer. The Heuer Monaco, the Autavia, the Carrera and the Breitling Chrono-Matic all arrived with Calibre 11 inside. Jack Heuer, who ran the company, has told the story of the race in his memoirs, and he was not shy about claiming the win.

Seiko did not announce anything. An internal report from May 1969 notes that the new model would be released to stores on 21 May, and case backs dated January 1969 have surfaced, suggesting production was running before either Swiss announcement. Seiko simply put the 6139 into the 5 Sports range as a workhorse, priced it modestly, and let people buy it.

So who was first?

It depends what you count. Zenith was first to announce. Seiko was first to sell. The Chronomatic was first to reach shops in volume in Europe and America. All three were, in a real sense, first, and the argument has been running in watch forums for fifty years with no sign of a verdict. Monochrome, in a long history of the El Primero, concluded that the controversy no longer really matters. What matters is that in the space of five months in 1969 the automatic chronograph went from impossible to available in three different forms, and the El Primero's combination of high beat, integration and column wheel is still, by common consent, the most technically ambitious of the three.

1975: the order to destroy

Then the quartz crisis arrived, and this is where the story turns from engineering to something closer to a thriller.

In 1971 Zenith had been bought by the Zenith Radio Corporation of Chicago, an American electronics company with the same name and no sentiment about mechanical watches. In 1975, as quartz swept the market, the American owners decided to stop making mechanical movements altogether, and in 1976 ordered the El Primero tooling, the presses, cams, cutters and drawings, sold for scrap by the ton to the highest bidder.

Charles Vermot was a workshop manager at Zenith. He had spent years on the El Primero and he did not accept the order. Night after night, with his brother Maurice, he carried the tooling, about 150 stamping presses and the complete technical plans, up to an attic in the factory, and bricked it in behind a wall. The company's own account, on its official timeline, puts it simply: defying his superiors, he secretly hid all the technical plans, along with over 150 stamping tools, in Zenith's attic.

The attic opens

Swiss ownership returned to Zenith in 1978. In the early 1980s, as the first signs of a mechanical revival appeared, Zenith was approached about supplying an automatic chronograph, and the answer, on paper, was that it could not: the tooling had been destroyed years earlier. Vermot took the management upstairs and showed them the wall.

The consequences were enormous. From 1984 Zenith rebuilt El Primero production, and in 1988 Rolex chose it, with around two hundred modifications and the beat slowed to 28,800, as calibre 4030 for the Daytona, the first automatic Daytona ever made. It stayed there until 2000, when Rolex finished its own chronograph movement. The Daytona is now among the most sought-after watches in the world, and for twelve years its engine came out of an attic in Le Locle that one man had refused to empty.

Why this matters to a beginner

The lesson is not really about winning races. It is that a movement is a body of knowledge, held in drawings and tooling and in the hands of the people who make it, and that knowledge is fragile. It can be scrapped by the ton in a bad year. It can also be saved by one person who understands what it is worth. The Calibre Learning Kit is a small act of the same kind: putting the knowledge of how a movement goes together into another pair of hands.

We wrote about Seiko's side of 1969, and about the Astron that arrived on Christmas Day of the same year, in our short history of Seiko.

Sources and further reading

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