Zenith is a Swiss watch manufacture founded in 1865 in Le Locle by Georges Favre-Jacot, who was all of 22 at the time. Most watch companies assemble parts made by other people; Favre-Jacot thought that was a bad idea, so he built the first fully integrated Swiss manufacture, with every discipline of watchmaking under one roof. The company is best known for the El Primero, one of the first automatic chronograph movements, launched in 1969 and still beating at 36,000 vibrations per hour today. That movement almost died in the 1970s, survived because one stubborn employee hid the plans in an attic, and then spent a decade inside the Rolex Daytona before coming home. It is one of the best stories in watches, and the brand behind it still struggles to get the credit it deserves.
Detail of a Zenith El Primero chronograph. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 fr.
A manufacture under one roof
In 1865 the Swiss watch industry was mostly a cottage system: one workshop cut gears, another made dials, a third assembled the whole thing, and everyone hoped the parts fit. Georges Favre-Jacot, a 22-year-old watchmaker from Le Locle, looked at that arrangement and decided to do everything himself. He visited the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, studied how American firms like Waltham mass-produced watches with interchangeable parts, and brought those methods back to a factory in Le Locle. His company, originally Georges Favre-Jacot & Co., put case-making, movement production, and final assembly under one roof. In Switzerland, that was new. The whole idea of the “manufacture,” which watch snobs argue about endlessly today, started here.
The name Zenith came in the early 1910s, when the firm became a stock company. Favre-Jacot had just finished a movement he considered more perfect than anything before it, and he named it after the highest point a star reaches in the sky. The star went into the logo. The company registered the word “Pilot” for its aviation watches back when powered flight was barely out of the rumor stage, which is the kind of trademark claim that sounds like a brag but actually checks out.
Zenith spent the first half of the 20th century being obsessive about precision, which paid off in the most competitive way available: observatory trials. Its Calibre 135 won five consecutive Neuchâtel Observatory prizes from 1950 to 1954, and the company has racked up more than 2,300 chronometry prizes in total, more than any other brand. In 1959 it bought the Martel movement maker to keep its supply chain in-house. By any technical measure, Zenith was already a heavyweight long before most people had heard of it.
El Primero and the race of 1969
Through the 1960s every serious watch company knew an automatic chronograph was coming, and nobody knew who would get there first. Zenith developed its calibre from 1965 and announced it in January 1969, in a three-way dead heat with Seiko’s 6139 and the Calibre 11 joint project from Heuer, Breitling, and Hamilton-Büren. All three have partisans who will argue forever about who was truly first. What is not debatable is the hardware: the El Primero was an integrated column-wheel chronograph running at 36,000 vibrations per hour, which is fast enough to measure tenths of a second. A high-beat automatic chronograph, made at industrial scale, in 1969. Nobody else had that.
The same year also brought the Defy, a chunky octagonal dive-style watch nicknamed the “coffre-fort,” the bank vault, that was so far ahead of its time it flopped. It got discontinued in the late 1970s and would have to wait decades for anyone to care about it again.
A Zenith El Primero chronograph. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.
Charles Vermot and the attic
The 1970s were brutal for this company. In 1971 the American Zenith Radio Corporation bought a controlling stake, mostly because the two companies had the same name, which is a shaky foundation for a marriage. When the quartz crisis hit, the new owners decided the future was battery-powered and ordered the Swiss side to stop making the El Primero entirely. In 1975 the directive went further: destroy the tools, the presses, the blueprints, all of it. Wipe the movement from existence.
Charles Vermot, a senior engineer in the chronograph department who had worked on the El Primero from the beginning, thought that was insane. So with the help of his brother and a few trusted co-workers, he spent evenings and weekends quietly packing up every plan, jig, press, and gear cutter needed to make the calibre, and hid it all in a walled-off section of the factory’s attic (a grenier, in French). He labeled everything so it could go back on the line later. He told almost nobody. If management had found out, he would have been fired, and the story everyone tells is that his wife, seeing how much time he spent at the factory after hours, was convinced he was having an affair.
Vermot’s note to management read: “You are wrong to believe that the automatic mechanical chronograph will die out completely.” He was right. In 1978 Zenith Radio sold the watch company back to a Swiss consortium led by the DIXI group, and the hoard came down from the attic. In 1981 the company sold its stock of El Primero calibres to Ebel. Then came the real rescue: Rolex needed a self-winding chronograph for its Daytona, which was still hand-wound and underperforming. Zenith had the goods. From 1988 to 2000, every Rolex Daytona ran on a modified El Primero, Rolex’s Calibre 4030, with the date removed and the beat rate tamed down to 28,800 vph. The most famous chronograph in the world was powered by the movement everyone had tried to throw away. That is Vermot’s doing.
LVMH and the modern era
LVMH bought Zenith in November 1999, and the brand’s recent history is basically a long argument about what it should be. The early 2000s under Thierry Nataf were big and loud, with complications like the 2003 Chronomaster Open and the 2004 Grande Chronomaster XXT Tourbillon, the first high-frequency tourbillon. Then in 2017 Jean-Claude Biver, running LVMH’s watch division, rebooted Zenith as the group’s horological flagship and relaunched the Defy with the Defy El Primero 21, a 50 Hz chronograph that measures hundredths of a second, which was genuinely the most precise production automatic chronograph on the market.
For the El Primero’s 50th anniversary in 2019, Zenith offered a 50-year warranty on select anniversary models, which is the kind of flex you can only pull when your movement has been running since 1969. The Chronomaster side of the house got its house in order too: the A386, the original 1969 El Primero watch with its tri-color subdials, was revived as the Chronomaster Original, and the line has become the brand’s most recognizable face.
A Zenith advertisement poster from 1928. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, Public domain.
Julien Tornare spent 2017 to 2024 cleaning up a messy, sprawling collection into a tight lineup of about 120 references, then left for TAG Heuer. Benoît de Clerck took over as CEO on January 3, 2024, and has kept the focus: Chronomaster for the heritage crowd, Defy for the loud crowd. The company turned 160 in 2025, still making its own movements in Le Locle, still beating at 36,000 vph.
Why it matters
Zenith has an honest problem and it is not the product. The movements are excellent, fully in-house, with a technical record almost nobody can touch, and the prices are saner than the competition. The problem is positioning. Inside LVMH, Biver promised Zenith would be “the horological leader of the stable,” but in practice Hublot gets the sponsorships and the spectacle and TAG Heuer gets the volume, while Zenith is left being “a brand for people in the know,” which is CEO-speak for a brand most people have never heard of. The modern catalog is also fond of limited editions the way some people are fond of collecting traffic tickets, and the brand’s two faces, the elegant heritage Chronomaster and the aggressively skeletonized Defy, sometimes look like two different companies.
But the Vermot story is the real thing, the single best rescue story in watchmaking, and the El Primero is a genuine legend that spent twelve years inside Rolex Daytonas while Zenith itself limped along. If you want to understand what a manufacture actually is, this is the company that invented the concept. Nobody outside the hobby cares, but the hobby should care more than it does.
Official site: zenith-watches.com
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