Closed | Important watches – Saturday 16 May 2015

Zenith's engineers started sketching on an automatic chronograph movement already in 1962. The plan was to present the movement just in time for the company's 100th anniversary in 1965, but the task proved to be more difficult than one first thought. Besides for being an automatic chronograph movement, it was supposed to be built without modules, have an amplitude of 36600 beats per hour, and show the date. This made it all so complicated; they missed the anniversary with four years.

On 10 January 1969 the first working prototype was presented at a press conference in Switzerland and the movement was then the first automatic chronograph to be shown for the public. The watch got the name "El Primero", which means the first in Esperanto.
It could have been the end for this movement in 1975 when Zenith was bought by American Zenith which made radio equipment. But the watchmaker Charles Vermot wouldn't let the machines get destroyed and hid them. Nine years later the production was resumed after both Ebel and Rolex had shown interest in the movement.