Zenith (watchmaker)


Zenith SA is a Swiss luxury watchmaker. The company was started in 1865 by Georges Favre-Jacot at the age of 22, in Le Locle in the canton of Neuchâtel. Zenith was purchased by LVMH in November 1999, becoming one of several brands in its watch and jewellery division which includes TAG Heuer and Hublot. Julien Tornare is the current CEO after Jean-Claude Biver in 2017, replacing CEO Aldo Magada, who had replaced Jean-Frédéric Dufour in 2014. Zenith is one of the Swiss watch manufacturers that still produce their own movements in-house.

History

George Favre-Jacot was born 1843 and died 1917. He was an apprentice within the watchmaking industry while still a youth. Favre-Jacot at some time requested that a house be built for himself at Le Locle, by the architect Le Corbusier. He was also closely involved with another prominent architect, named Alphonse Laverrière. His relationship with this latter architect was the source of influence upon the Werkbund movement. The two men collaborated with a shared artistic vision of the nature of production, to the extent to which they themselves somewhat reformed the artistic situation within francophone Switzerland at the time.

Collections

Currently, Zenith has the following collections:

El Primero

The El Primero calibre was first released in 1969, went out of production in 1975 and was resurrected in 1986.
It was one of the first automatic chronograph movements and has a frequency of 36,000 vibrations per hour. Zenith's El Primero movement was used by Rolex from 1988 to 2000 for the Rolex Daytona chronograph. The El Primero movement's high rate allows a resolution of of a second and a potential for greater positional accuracy over the more common standard frequency of 28,800 vibrations per hour. The El Primero was honoured with a 2012 release of the El Primero Stratos Flyback Striking 10th, limited to 1,969 pieces, that housed the same 36,000 vph movement and a sub-dial measuring in tenths of a second to make a complete rotation every ten seconds.

Photo gallery

Notable patrons and owners

owned a Zenith pocket watch with alarm function, which was given to him by Indira Nehru, the 3rd Prime Minister of India. On March 5, 2009, the pocket watch along with some of Gandhi's other personal stuff was auctioned by Antiquorum in New York, altogether fetching US$2,096,000.