LUXURY WATCH EDIT
ROX MAGAZINE
WHAT’S THE FREQUENCY, ZENITH? Future proof innovation makes Zenith tick. Words by Alex Doak.
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t might still be nestled among similarly quaint Art Nouveau buildings, deep in a remote valley, but Zenith has always been the future of Swiss watchmaking. When a 22-year-old Georges Favre-Jacot set up shop in Le Locle village over 150 years ago, his was the only factory in the Swiss Jura mountains to be fitted with electric lighting, let alone the first one to bring all of watchmaking’s key skills under one roof, rather than rely on the Jura Mountains’ sprawling cottage industry. Not only that, but Favre-Jacot pioneered the transfer of American industrial methods to the Jura, buying precision machinery for the production of highly interchangeable parts in big series. (An approach adopted three years later by Florentine Ariosto Jones, AKA father of IWC.) Yet still, after 300 patents, 600 movement variations and a staggering 2,333 prizes in the field of precision chronometry, Zenith continues to find itself firmly rooted in the art of the ‘chronograph’ stopwatch function. More
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precisely: El Primero. When first unveiled in January of 1969, pipping Heuer and Breitling’s collaborative ‘Calibre 11’ to the post by six months, Zenith’s El Primero could proudly advertise itself not only as the world’s first self-winding chronograph but also the first to tick at the highly precise frequency of 36,000 vibrations per hour, or 5 Hertz. This meant you could time events down to an accuracy of one tenth of a second, rather than the eighth afforded by all other 4Hz, or 28,800vph chronographs. Fittingly, El Primero made its debut later in 1969 powering a watch design far ahead of its time. The ‘A384’ (not named after the trunk road connecting Buckfastleigh and Totnes in Devon) housed its 5Hz mechanics in a steel case with angular facets straight off a Buck Rogers extra. For the A384’s 50th-anniversary revival this year, Zenith’s boffins went even more far out, 3D-scanning and digitising a museum original for perfect reproduction.
