Chronomania: The 50-Year History of the Automatic Chronograph

Fifty years ago, the consortium of Heuer-Leonidas, Breitling, Buren-Hamilton and Dubois Dépraz vied with lone wolves Zenith and Seiko in the race to launch the world's first automatic chronograph movement A short article announced that Heuer's competitor Zenith had developed the world's first automatic chronograph and was already showing functional prototypes of El Primero "The automatic chronograph was the greatest horological invention of the 20th century, which had otherwise produced nothing genuinely groundbreaking in this field.

Switzerland's chronograph manufacturers hoped it would give them access to new markets and serve them as an innovative and sales-boosting bestseller - if they could launch it before Omega, which led the chronograph market at the time." We now know that the first company to begin developing a self-winding chronograph wristwatch was Zenith, which started the project in 1962 and planned to launch the world's first automatic chronograph to coincide with the company's centennial in 1965 Heuer agreed because he shared their belief that the future belonged to the automatic chronograph A year earlier, when the world was watching the Olympic Games in Tokyo, Seiko had presented its first chronograph wristwatch, which still relied on manual winding.

Seiko premiered its first self-winding chronograph wristwatches in May of the same historic year. . Source