It would take until 1978 before they started up again (which is a whole other story you’d probably enjoy reading: Google ‘Charles Vermot’). Unfortunately, due to the quartz crisis, Zenith went out of business soon after before they were able to put their new engine into serious production. The Chronomatic Group had made the Caliber 11. The three-way race ended in 1969 with three different and variously successful movements. In Japan, Seiko had also set their minds to the project, as had a consortium of other Swiss brands (Heuer, Breitling, Hamilton-Buren and Dubois Depraz) known as the Chronomatic Group. In 1962, they decided to address the challenge, teaming up with fellow countrymen, Movado and setting to work. So the Daytona lagged behind massively and would continue to do so until someone came along and invented an automatic chronograph movement, seen as the last holy grail of mechanical watchmaking at the time. A watch you had to remember to wind yourself everyday seemed positively archaic and to make matters worse, if a buyer wanted a manually-wound chronograph, Omega had already cornered the market with their Speedmaster, soon to be named NASA’s official timepiece for all space missions. Its image was hampered by its manually winding caliber-something of an irony seeing as it was made by the marque which had produced the first workable automatic movement.īut that was in the 1930s and by the time the Daytona was released the world was into the burgeoning Space Age, and not only were self-winding watches par for the course, but the first rumblings of quartz technology were starting to be heard.
Yet when the Daytona hit the shelves, it was met with a great shrug of indifference. Rolex was on a high and fully expected their racer’s stopwatch to carry on their single-minded rise to the top of the industry. It was an excellent, handsome and beautifully engineered piece, as you would expect from the manufacture which had already just brought out the Explorer, Submariner, GMT-Master, Day-Date and Milgauss all within the space of six or seven years. There was nothing at all wrong with the watch. The history of the Rolex Daytona and its incredible success hinges massively on the technological breakthrough Zenith made with their El Primero.įor anyone in the dark, when Rolex launched their first production chronograph in 1963 it was the closest that giant of a brand had come to experiencing out-and-out failure.
For this edition of our ‘Rivalry’ series, we take a look at two watches that manage to be fierce competitors while also sharing a vital bond in each others narratives.
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