Zenith El Primero
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The Zenith El Primero is a movement before it is a watch: the integrated automatic chronograph calibre Zenith announced in January 1969, built as a column-wheel chronograph with the winding rotor and the chronograph works designed together rather than stacked as a module. It runs at 36,000 vibrations an hour, twice the usual rate, which is why it can resolve a tenth of a second on the dial, and it is the reason the name means "the first" in Esperanto: Zenith got there ahead of the Calibre 11 consortium and of Seiko in the same year.
Its survival is the better story. When the Zenith Radio Corporation ordered the mechanical tooling scrapped in the 1970s, the watchmaker Charles Vermot hid the presses, cams and blueprints in a walled-off attic at Le Locle rather than destroy them, and the calibre went back into production in the 1980s from exactly that cache, later supplying Rolex's own Daytona. (Zenith) The name has since been applied to the A386 reissues, the Rainbow, the Class, the Chronomaster and dozens of other references, so a sighting normally supports the line rather than one of them.
Appearances
| Title | Year | Type | Actor | Character |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Entrapment (1999) | 1999 | Film | Sean Connery | Robert MacDougal |