Zenith (watch brand)

Zenith logo

**Zenith** is a Swiss luxury watch manufacturer. The company was founded in 1865 in Le Locle in the canton of Neuchâtel by Georges Favre - Jacot when he was 22 years old. In November 1999, LVMH acquired Zenith SA, adding it to its portfolio of watch brands along with TAG Heuer and Hublot. Julien Tornard has been CEO since 2017. Zenith is one of the few Swiss watchmakers that still produce their own in-house movements.

Georges Favre-Jacot was born in 1843. From his youth he worked in the watch industry. In 1865, at the age of 22, Farve-Jacot began making watches under his own name in a small workshop in Le Locle. Given the success of the American watch companies Waltham and Elgin, using mass production to sell affordable and reliable watches, he invested heavily in his own company to create a vertically integrated production. In 1911 he renamed his company Zenith. Favre-Jacot collaborated with renowned architects and influenced the art of architecture in Switzerland. For example, he asked the architect Le Corbusier to build a house for him in Le Locle. Favre-Jacot was closely associated with the eminent architect Alphonse Laveriere. The two men worked closely together as they shared a common artistic vision of the nature of production. The collaboration was so fruitful that they influenced the artistic environment in French-speaking Switzerland at the time and the Swiss Industrial Union, created in 1911.

Currently, the following collections of watches are presented in Zenith  :

-Defy (" *the future of tradition* ")

-Chronomaster (" *a legend on the wrist* ")

-Elite (" *timeless elegance by Zenith* ")

-Pilot (" *course to distant horizons* ")

The El Primero caliber, first introduced in 1969, was the first high-frequency automatic chronograph movement. This model made Zenith watches much more popular. Charles Vermo, one of the first watchmakers to work on the movement, took on the responsibility of saving the movement. In 1975, the brand's owners decided to abandon the idea of ​​a mechanical chronograph and focus on quartz watches. At this time, the “quartz crisis” continued in the world of the watch industry. Unused tools, components and other tooling used to produce the caliber were scrapped or sold. Vermo collected all the necessary technical drawings and tools and hid them in a walled-in attic at the Zenith factory in order to preserve the El Primero mechanism for future generations. Ten years later, in 1986, when the company returned to the idea of ​​producing this mechanism, the same tools, drawings and components helped to start production of the El Primero again. It was one of the first automatic chronograph movements with a frequency of 36,000 vibrations per hour (10  Hz ). The El Primero movement was used by Rolex from 1988 to 2000 for the Rolex Daytona Chronograph. The high frequency of the El Primero allows time to be recorded with an accuracy of 1 ⁄ 10 seconds, which is much more than the more common standard frequency of 28,800 vibrations per hour (8 Hz). The El Primero movement was installed in 2012 in the El Primero Stratos Flyback Striking 10th watch, a limited edition of 1969 pieces (in honor of the original release date of 1969), which was equipped with a sub-dial with a scale of tenths of a second, making a full revolution every ten seconds.

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