1969. Man walks on the moon; the Arpanet project – the ancestor of the Internet – is launched; Concorde takes off and defies the sound barrier; while hundreds of thousands of people flock to the Woodstock festival.
1969 marked another revolution, this time of the horological kind: the birth of the El Primero caliber, the first ever automatic chronograph. Better still, the caliber was integrated and designed as a complete whole with no additional module, but instead a column wheel and a central rotor on ball bearings.
EL PRIMERO, THE FIRST
AUTOMATIC CHRONOGRAPH
IN HISTORY
Another no less significant first was the fact that this movement beat at 36,000 vibrations per hour, making it the world’s most accurate chronograph.
This was an unprecedented feat, especially given the over 50-hour power reserve that was an exceptional performance for such a high-frequency movement. To complicate matters still further, the caliber was equipped with a date and miniaturized to a size of just 6.5 mm thick and 29.33 mm in diameter.
El Primero Striking 10th, Caliber 4052
El Primero Chronomaster 1969
While each of these criteria was revolutionary in itself for the time, together they represented a truly major accomplishment. Its technical specifications were indeed so complex that it took seven years to develop, and the legend has remained vibrantly alive ever since.
The El Primero is still the world’s most precise series-made caliber and the only one capable of measuring short times to the nearest 1/10th of a second.
THE EL PRIMERO LEGEND IS STILL BEING WRITTEN
Such an exceptional caliber deserved to be exceptionally tested. In 1970, El Primero took the Air France AF015 flight from Paris to New York – but not comfortably installed on a traveller’s wrist. Instead, the El Primero crossed the Atlantic fixed to the landing gear of the Boeing 707.
The temperature stood at 4°C on the tarmac in Paris, whereas 20 minutes later, at an altitude of 10,000 meters, it had dropped to -62° and atmospheric pressure was four times lower.
After the landing in New York, during which it was subjected to terrible jolting, the watch showed it had remained accurate to the nearest second apart from the inevitable time-zone difference. El Primero had kept running at 36,000 vibrations per hour and required no adjustment.