Credits: Article and images by Joshua Munchow @ Quill & Pad. See the original article here - https://quillandpad.com/2023/09/02/zenith-x-kari-voutilainen-x-phillips-calibre-135-observatoire-10-of-the-worlds-highest-precision-competition-winning-chronometer-movements-ready-for-the-wrist-reprise/
A long, long time ago, the people of the mystical land called Schwyz looked up to the sun shining on the mountains and were happy in their villages. Over generations, the outside world passed through and ate of their larders, but life stayed peaceful in the valleys among the cows.
Eventually, life changed and became busier, leading the people of what was now known as Schwiiz to find a need for planning their days more precisely. This led to the invention of a thing called time, which many thereafter have generally regarded as a bad move.
But with the invention of time came inventions for keeping track of time, something the Switzer people (who changed the name of their land yet again) began to focus a lot of their energies on creating. Eventually, the Swiss, who took a mighty long while to settle on a name for themselves, became the best in the world at creating machines that kept track of everyone’s favorite feature of existence.
They became so good, in fact, that they began to hold competitions to see just how good they were, in which craftsman calling themselves watchmakers would offer up their machines for combat.
Perhaps combat is an extreme designation, but many of these so called “watches” (a misnomer if I’ve ever heard one) would go head to head for grueling periods of operation, with machines failing and dying until only one was left ticking. After weeks and months of trial, one watch would be crowned the most accurate in all the lands, not just in the valleys of Switzerland.
These competitions lasted for generations until, after almost two centuries of masterful mechanical creations, a new invention surpassed everything that had come before by leaps and bounds, proving the precise measurement of time to be easy and almost trivial.
Zenith advertisement from 1954 touting the chronometer competition-winning nature of Zenith
But near the end of the competition era, just a decade or so before they were deemed obsolete, a (quite literal) star was making its name known as the most accurate around. It was regarded as the cream of the crop, the ultimate watchmaker, a group that had reached the zenith of skill.
Funnily enough, this grouping of craftspeople changed its name to Zenith in 1911 (the Swiss really like to change names, it seems) upon winning the Grand Prix at the 1900 World’s Fair for its “Zenith” movement, so named because founder Georges Farve-Jacot believed it represented the best in watchmaking.
The movement that had won so many competitions in the then-unbeknownst waning years of the observatory competitions was Zenith Caliber 135-O, a specially calibrated spinoff of the production version of Caliber 135. And while most of my story up to here was indeed fancifully (and loosely) based on historical facts, Zenith Caliber 135-O was 100 percent real and pretty incredible.
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Credits: Article and images by Joshua Munchow @ Quill & Pad. See the original article here - https://quillandpad.com/2023/09/02/zenith-x-kari-voutilainen-x-phillips-calibre-135-observatoire-10-of-the-worlds-highest-precision-competition-winning-chronometer-movements-ready-for-the-wrist-reprise/
