Zenith

Georges Favre-Jacot founded Zenith in Le Locle, in the Swiss Jura, in 1865, aged 22, and built one of the first watch manufactures to bring every trade under one roof. In January 1969 it unveiled the El Primero, the first automatic chronograph movement to beat at 36,000 vibrations an hour, and the calibre survived the quartz crisis only because a watchmaker, Charles Vermot, hid its tooling in the factory attic. LVMH has owned Zenith since 1999.