The Zenith watch company is located in Le Locle, Switzerland. Le Locle is a small city settled among the beautiful Jura mountains in the canton of Neuchatel. Despite its small size and rural setting, Le Locle as well as neighboring La Chaux de Fond are home to a long list of some of the biggest names in Swiss watches. Drive around the area, and you'll see factories everywhere with such names as Ulysse Nardin, Cartier, Corum, Tissot, Tag Heuer and Zenith Watches.
Watchmaking has thrived here for a long time as precious skills are passed from one generation to the next. In 1865 a prodigious young watchmaker named Georges Favre-Jacot founded a new watch manufacture. It is said that one evening, after completing work on a new movement that approached perfection, he went outside, gazed into the night sky, and came upon the name zenith, meaning the highest point in the universe for which he called his new movement and watch manufacture. A single, bold star was adopted as the symbol of Zenith watches.
Throughout the end of the 19th and into the 20th century, Zenith watches amassed a fine reputation winning more than 1565 watch industry awards. But it was not until 1969 that Zenith introduced the movement which has become synonymous with Zenith name and which has become a standard for excellence in watchmaking, the El Primero.
The Zenith El Primero watch movement is unique among watch movements in that its balance wheel oscillates at 36,000 alternations per hour. In other words, it's very very fast. This compares to the more typical 28,000 oscillations of the ubiquitous Valjoux and ETA 7750 movements. The speed of the movement allows for more precisely measured time. The Zenith El Primero is the only mechanical chronograph that can measure short time intervals to 1/10 of a second. Despite its enormous power requirements, the El Primero maintains a power reserve of 50 hours and can be fitted with a variety of complications.
Ironically, as Zenith Watches introduced its greatest achievement, the El Primero movement, another introduction in the watch industry would shake and nearly destroy traditional Swiss watchmaking: the quartz watch. Accurate, easily mass produced and inexpensive, the quartz watch to many seemed to mark the end of the mechanical watch. Brands like Seiko Watches began to churn out millions of inexpensive, good quality quartz watches.
Many watch manufacturers ceased to exist during this period, but Zenith persisted, most often by supplying their El Primero movement to some large and very prestigious watch manufacturers (one starts with an R and ends with an x) for use in their own watches.
The late 1980s marked a resurgence and renewed appreciation for the mechanical watch. Zenith introduced its Elite movement in 1994. The Zenith Elite movement like the El Primero is produced in-house by Zenith maintaining its status as a true manufacture, a special status awarded to the few watch companies that produce their own movements. The Elite movement is a much thinner movement than the El Primero. Not a chronograph movement like El Primero, the Elite movement allows Zenith to produce watches with sleeker profiles that still maintain Zenith's exacting standards.
Zenith was acquired by the LVMH Group (Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy) in 1999 and has since introduced one stunning design after another. We hope you'll enjoy browsing our selection of the latest Zenith watches.
