Zenith Defy El Primero 21

Georges Favre-Jacot founded Zenith in Le Locle in 1865, aged twenty-two, with an idea that was radical for the Swiss industry: bring every trade needed to make a watch — movement, case, dial, hands — under one roof and one management. The integrated manufacture was largely his invention, and the Le Locle site he built is still in use.

The approach produced results at observatory trials, where Zenith accumulated more precision awards than any other manufacture. The name itself came from a calibre Favre-Jacot considered the summit of his work.

Its defining achievement is the El Primero of 1969, developed over seven years and announced in the same year as the Heuer-Breitling consortium's Calibre 11 and Seiko's 6139. It was an integrated automatic chronograph beating at 36,000 vibrations per hour, allowing measurement to a tenth of a second — a frequency almost nothing else matched for decades.

It nearly did not survive. When American owners ordered the mechanical tooling scrapped during the quartz crisis, a watchmaker named Charles Vermot hid the plans, presses, and cams in a walled-off attic. When demand for mechanical chronographs returned, Zenith could restart production because of him. Rolex used the El Primero in the Daytona from 1988 to 2000.

LVMH acquired Zenith in 1999.