Chronomaster

The collection is named for the case, but it is really named for the movement inside it. El Primero was announced in January 1969 in the three-way race to build the first automatic chronograph, and it was the only one of the three running at 36,000 vibrations per hour — fast enough to measure a tenth of a second. Zenith's owners ordered the tooling scrapped during the quartz crisis; watchmaker Charles Vermot hid it in a walled-off attic instead, which is the only reason the movement survives. Zenith used El Primero as a collection name in its own right until around 2020, then folded those references into Chronomaster.

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