Zenith

Georges Favre-Jacot was twenty-two when he started his watchmaking business in Le Locle in 1865. In the Swiss town, work passed between specialists in houses and small workshops before a watch was finished. He brought those trades together in a factory. The site grew large enough to have its own connection to the railway station for deliveries of raw materials.

The name Zenith first belonged to one of its movements, the mechanism inside a watch. After it won a Grand Prix at the Paris exhibition in 1900, the company adopted the name in 1911.

Watchmakers tested their best work in competitions at observatories, which measured how accurately the mechanisms kept time. At Zenith, Charles Fleck and René Gygax adjusted movements for these trials. Their work helped Zenith take first prize in the wristwatch category at Neuchâtel five years running, from 1950 to 1954. These movements were specially prepared for competition, separate from the watches sold to customers.

In 1969, Zenith introduced El Primero. It combined a stopwatch with a watch that wound itself as its wearer moved. Its mechanism divided each second into ten steps, allowing the stopwatch to measure tenths of a second.

That same year, Seiko put its first quartz wristwatch on sale. A battery and an electrically driven quartz crystal could keep time far more accurately than an ordinary mechanical watch. For companies whose reputation depended on precision, the competition had changed. In 1975, Zenith's management stopped El Primero production.

Charles Vermot had worked on the movement from its early batches. According to Zenith's account, he kept the technical plans and the stamping tools and cutters used to make the parts, against management's wishes. He hid them in a walled-off part of the factory attic and listed what he had stored in a ring binder.

Zenith changed owners in 1978. When the company prepared to make El Primero again, Vermot showed the new management the equipment he had saved. The drawings and the tools to manufacture the parts were still there. Zenith dates the restart of production to 1984, nine years after it had stopped.