#784: Automatic for the People

Posted on January 7, 2026 (Updated February 10, 2026) by ewand

Following on from last month’s missive (#783) on internal competition, we’re going to look at a case where it may have successfully spurred a company, and an example of surprising collaboration between erstwhile competitors.

Also, how is it 33 years since R.E.M. released AFTP?

The world’s first automatic chronograph watch

In the 1950s and 60s, clock and watch making was a hotbed of innovation just like the automobile industry and the race for space. New designs and technologies were coming thick and fast. Quartz crystals and batteries were still way out on the horizon, so the Swiss-dominated mechanical watch industry took great pride in building very precise instruments.

Open the back of a mechanical wristwatch and you’ll see many tiny components meshed together to make a little engine that measures out time and moves the hands on the dial appropriately.

Article content — *An Omega 321 movement, as found in the Omega Speedmaster watches which went to the Moon*

Everything is generally driven by a coiled spring which is tightened and powers the whole “movement” as it unwinds in a controlled fashion. Manually-wound watches usually need a few turns of the “crown” on the side, perhaps every day or two. Many clocks work the same way, but with a larger spring might only need a few minutes of winding with a key every month or so.

Though pioneered in the late 18th century, automatic watches (which wind the spring through harvesting energy from the movement of the watch on the wrist) really took off in the early part of the 20th century. If you can see the movement of an automatic watch – either through the see-through “exhibition case” sometimes fitted, or by taking the back off it – it will often have a large “rotor” which swings back and forth as you move the watch on your wrist. You might feel or even hear it moving.

*An automatic Rolex 1560 movement from the early 1960s*

The rotor signifies that the dreadfully tiresome task of winding your watch every day was dispensed with. But some fancier watches with additional “complications” still had to be manually-wound; perhaps most notably chronographs, watches equipped with a stopwatch function.

Early “chronograph” clocks and watches were so called because they recorded the time using ink on the actual dial – making an ink mark or arc to record how long an event (like a horse race) lasted.

Necessity is the mother of invention

Wrist-worn chronographs (which only show the time, not write it) were popular in the 50s and 60s, especially amongst sporting types, perhaps inspired by famous racing drivers like Stirling Moss, Jim Clark or Dan Gurney.

Go-faster watch companies even named their products like Speedmaster, Daytona (after the Floridian racing circuit) or Carrera (after the Carrera Panamericana race).

But all of these famous chronographs were manually-wound. There was clear demand for the thrusting racy gentleman to have a stopwatch on his wrist that wound itself. Unfortunately, the technical challenge of building such a complicated mechanism that was small and robust enough to wear comfortably was tough.

It was common for watch makers to buy-in the movement they fitted to their watch, just as they’d have the dial made by a specialist, the case fabricated by another and so on. Think of it like a boutique car maker producing a vehicle using an off-the-shelf engine from an external manufacturer. Even major watch producers at the time, bought watch movements from “ébauche manufactures” like Valjoux, Lemania or Venus, none of whom had the resources to dedicate to producing an automatic chronograph. The famous Paul Newman Daytona – auctioned for $15M+ – had a manual-wind Valjoux 72 movement.

So began a famous collaboration between companies that might otherwise be seen as competitors – the watchmakers Breitling, Buren, Hamilton and Heuer got together with Dépraz, who made components for movements, to form what is now known as the Chronomatic Consortium.

Buren had pioneered their own automatic movements which had a “micro-rotor” rather than a big plate half the diameter of the watch. Dépraz had a chronograph module which they figured could be adapted to essentially bolt on to a variant of Buren’s base movement, thus giving them essentially two mechanisms powered by the same spring. In order for them all to fit together, the crown for setting the time had to be on the opposite side to the pushers that worked the chronograph.

In 1969, Breitling, Heuer and Hamilton (who absorbed Buren during the years of development in the late 1960s) went on to launch ostensibly similar watches with the same basic “Caliber 11” movement within. Heuer’s are arguably most iconic, with the square-cased Monaco appearing on the wrist of the King of Cool, Steve McQueen, in the 1971 film, Le Mans.

The story behind McQueen’s watch is quite fortuitous; Heuer had a name for sports timekeeping and sponsored various cars and race teams. When McQueen was preparing for the Le Mans film, he said he wanted to look exactly like pro driver Jo Siffert, so donned the same overalls with the big Heuer logo. They also supplied props for the filming including watches.

Heuer and the rest of the “Project 99” / Chronomatic group touted their watches as the world’s first automatic chronographs, though competitor Zenith had been working on their own in-house movement and were so confident they would be first, they launched it in a watch brazenly called “El Primero”.

Even though they’d been working on it for 8 years, and announced it in January 1969, it took Zenith until September ‘69 to start selling their watch, by which time they were more like “El Tercero”, as the Chronomatics’ Caliber 11 was already being sold under several brands, and unseen but coming up the inside on the rails was a company very far from the Swiss cartels, who had designed and built an automatic chronograph and started manufacturing AND selling it in early 1969: Seiko.

Taking on the Swiss

Founded in late 1800s, “Seiko” was in fact several companies under the family of its founder, K Hattori. As Japan opened up to outside trade and competition, Hattori-san started by importing and selling western clocks, jewellery and watches, before starting to develop its own in-house offerings.

After WWII, Seiko developed a diverse range of horological kit – the official timekeeper of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Japan’s first Automatic watch, its first Chronograph, first diving watch, even getting into high-end accuracy in watches such that they took the fight to the Swiss on their own turf. There were watch “trials” in Neuchâtel and Geneva in the early 60s, to showcase how manufacturers could produce watches of incredible accuracy. After a few misses, Seiko showed up and started wiping the floor – to the point where the highest profile trials were cancelled the year after. Maybe the Swiss didn’t like getting beaten so took their ball away and went home.

Seiko’s “warring factories”

Revisiting the theme of internal competition, one unusual aspect of Seiko’s approach was to have two completely separate factories, separate companies even, operating to win the same customer. Daini Seikosha, in Ginza, downtown Tokyo, and rural Suwa Seikosha, near Nagano, shared hardly any technical know-how and yet were seemingly pitching similar watches to the same customers. The short version of history is that they were out and out competitors, but a subtler take is that both Daini and Suwa were children of the parent, and expected to treat each other with familial respect, even splitting some tasks occasionally.

A somewhat unlikely source, tech company Atlassian hosts a great series of podcasts on telling stories of team working, and they had a really good 30 minute one from the depths of COVID time, on Seiko’s “Duelling Factories”.

It’s never really been satisfactorily explained why Seiko had two factories that shared so little. There are some examples where a watch developed in one was manufactured – perhaps only for a short while – in the other as well (maybe a capacity issue?), but allowing two separate R&D outfits to develop products that directly compete for the same customer seems like madness to most of us. Then again, look at vintage catalogs, and there are hundreds of pages of barely distinguishable watches, so maybe they just threw everything they could at the wall to see what stuck.

The race for space

The Suwa factory arguably won the race to make the first automatic chronograph; they had 6139-6010 model watches in production from January 1969. When Jack Heuer, CEO of the eponymous company, was exhibiting their first Caliber 11 watches at the Baselworld show in the spring of 1969, Seiko’s president congratulated him on their achievement, electing not to mention that Seiko had built their own, integrated, in-house automatic chronograph and had been already selling it for months, at a fraction of the price of the Heuers, et al.

The 6139 chronograph went into numerous shaped watches over the decade or so of production, famously adorning the wrists of Bruce Lee, Flash Gordon, even making it as the first automatic chronograph in space via the pocket of Col William Pogue. What later transpired is that Pogue’s mission Commander, Jerry Carr, was sneaking aboard a Movado chronograph too. Movado was a sister brand to Zenith, and its watch ran on Zenith’s 3019 PHC “El Primero” movement. So a dead heat to be the first in zero gravity, then.

In the meantime, the Daini Seikosha factory had been working on its own, thinner and slightly more exotic, automatic chronograph movement – the 7016. Sharing no components whatsoever and being of quite different architecture to the 6139, the 7016 was a few years later to market and arguably missed the buzz of its sibling. As such, 701x watches are a good bit rarer.

Both movements were integrated, i.e. designed from the outset as automatic chronographs, rather than bolted together such as the Chronomatic Cal 11. The 6139 was the first chronograph to use a vertical clutch, an advanced coupling mechanism now the norm for high-end watches from Rolex, Patek Phillippe and so on. The 7016 has a sub-dial register which counts both hours and minutes, has a horizontal clutch but features a flyback mechanism and was the thinnest automatic chronograph movement for 15 years. The more popular square-ish case shape also leads to its nickname, “Monaco”, after the Heuer model.

Maybe they were aimed at the same customer, though the 7016 was around 38% more expensive than an equivalent 6139. Presumably available side-by-side from the same retailer. What were they thinking?

#782: What IS the time, Mr Wolf?

Posted on November 5, 2025 (Updated February 10, 2026) by ewand

Time is relative, man. In practice, since most of us are not rushing about at or near to the speed of light, it feels pretty much a constant, and is something we all too easily take for granted.

The relative importance of the time of day to a caveman would be what time the sun rises and sets, and he wouldn’t really need to define it empirically since all the other things he interacted with would be driven by the same schedule. He wouldn’t care how many hours there were in the day, only that seasons might change and the days would be longer and shorter.

Measuring time accurately and consistently became a challenge throughout human development, particularly once we started to travel around. Manufacturing, commerce, communications and more all depend on knowing what the time is, sometimes to an extremely accurate degree. Even kiddies’ games too.

Where am I?

In the 17th Century, King Charles II* of England, Scotland and Ireland saw fit to create a Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, in order to keep up with advances in astrology that rivals (especially the French) were making.

Back in 1676, the first “Astronomer Royal”, John Flamsteed, was tasked with finding a way to more accurately navigate at sea. In essence, he began working on the base for subdivision of time zones and for calculating longitude (i.e. how far east or west they are) and therefore help ships not get lost at sea.

The Prime Meridian was defined quite some years later – 1851 – and was chosen (in 1884) as the basis for most navigation systems and the means by which the globe is split up into time zones. East and West is measured in degrees of longitude with the Meridian (and associated Greenwich Mean Time) at point zero.

You can visit the Greenwich Observatory and stand with one foot in the western hemisphere and the other in the eastern hemisphere.

*Interestingly, while Chaz II was profligate in producing illegitimate children – Irvine Welsh might even describe him as a “flamboyant shagger” – he had no direct heirs. All things being as they are, when current King Charles III’s son, Prince William, ascends to the throne, he’ll be the first monarch descended from Charles II due to his mother’s ancestry.

When is it?

Observing the celestial bodies can help narrow down where you are but to be precise, you need instrumentation which can accurately measure time. In principle, a navigator out at sea could figure out what the time is where s/he was (based on placement of the sun and possibly using stars at night) and could calculate latitude (i.e. how far north or south he or she was).

If there was a way of knowing what the time was at a fixed point, then they could figure out longitude as well, by comparing the current location’s time and the what the time was at, say, Greenwich. Imagine a sailor halfway across the Atlantic – if they know it’s noon by observing the sun but they had a clock set to GMT which said it was 3pm, they could calculate the number of degrees of longitude difference and therefore pinpoint where they are, with at least a degree of certainty.

Unfortunately, accuracy of clocks and watches in the 17th century was pretty woeful – many early timepieces only had a single hand, as they weren’t really accurate enough to measure minutes. Sundials remained the most accurate way of measuring time.

The only clocks which could keep good time needed pendulums to swing and that doesn’t really work when the clock is pitching up and down on the waves, so once a sailor had left port there was no way of them keeping track of time at a known point, only the time where they were now.

Following repeated tragic shipwrecks due to vessels being off course to where they expected, the Board of Longitude was established in 1714, with a generous bounty (several £M in today’s money) promised to anyone could solve the problem.

Clockmaker John Harrison devoted much of his life to building clocks and “marine chronometers” which could prove remarkably accurate, enough to measure longitude over a long sea voyage. One test, by King George III no less, measured accuracy within 1/3 of a second per day over a 10-week period, and Captain Cook took a replica of Harrison’s H4 clock to his second voyage down under. They were expensive – about a third the cost of the ship – but if they helped avoid catastrophe, they were worth it. After much shenanigans, Harrison finally received the Board of Longitude’s payout when George III* personally intervened.

*It’s said that when the film version of “The Madness of George III” was released, it was re-titled The Madness of King George, so American audiences wouldn’t think it was a sequel and that they’d missed parts 1 and 2.

You can take a guided tour of the Observatory, seeing some of Harrison’s clocks and telling the story of what a massive impact solving that tricky problem had, seemingly trivial in today’s world: how knowing the time can help to pinpoint where you are.

You might even be lucky to be guided by former Master Mariner, John Noakes, who now volunteers at the Observatory. A life spent selling strategic software solutions has not dulled his enthusiasm for the subjects of seafaring, navigation and time.

The Royal Observatory played an important part in setting the time for ships, too – at exactly 1pm every day, the brightly-coloured Time Ball drops and any ships within sight of the Observatory could adjust their own clocks to make sure they remained accurate.

There was even a family – culminating in spinster Ruth Bellville – who “sold time” by taking a 1794 chronometer pocket watch and regularly setting it correctly from Greenwich. First her parents and then Ruth would journey around London, showing the watch to their clients (clock and watch makers, or other businesses) so they could accurately synchronise their own clocks to be within a few seconds of Greenwich Mean Time.

Despite availability of radio technology and even the Pips, it’s pretty remarkable that as late as the 1940s, people were still giving money to an old lady toting around a 130+ year old pocket watch, just to have a look at it.

19th and 20th Century Time

By the early 1800s, it was common for towns in the UK to have clocks in their church or town hall, and that was the reference for things of local importance, like what time the marketplace opened. Those clocks would be set by the midday sun so they would be more-or-less correct.

The problem is, noon in (say) Bristol might be 6 or 7 minutes later by celestial time than it is in London, and that made things difficult when trying to operate between the two, such as making a railway journey according to a published timetable.

Great Western Railway was the first, in 1840, to adopt a universal time standard set by Greenwich, which meant if you were catching a 2pm train in Bristol, it would be 2pm London Time even if a clock in Brissl said it was still 1:53.

Despite some resistance from red-faced locals complaining of interference from the capital city, it wasn’t long before everything across the country became synchronised to GMT and the idea of locally-defined time went away.

From grandfather clocks and pocket watches, by the mid-1900s, wearing a wristwatch became more the norm for gentlemen. Well-to-do ladies may have had a bracelet watch for some time, but it was during the Boer War that soldiers started routinely strapping a small pocket watch to their wrists so they could easily coordinate actions. It didn’t matter so much what the correct time was, so long as they all had their watches synchronised on the same time.

During the mid to late 20th century, the development of electronic time keeping made it much easier for people to know what the accurate time was. Atomic clocks were developed to measure down to tiny fractions of a second, and even redefined the international standard of “a second” as being based on the vibrations of a particular atom.

Scientists have even proved Einstein’s theory of relativity applies, by raising one of two atomic clocks by 1 foot in height, and seeing how it sped up ever so slightly. It’s only 90 billionths of a second faster over the span of a human lifetime, so tall people really needn’t worry about ageing quicker.

Further Watching and Reading

Futurologist Ray Kurzweil proposed in 1999 that the rate of innovation is itself accelerating, so that the first 30 years of the 21st century would see the same or greater technological change than all of the change from the 20th. Some of Ray’s predictions are a bit whacko, but consider that the 20th century itself gave us flight, adoption of mass transit and telecommunications, the transistor, electronic computers, the internet…

… so how have the first 2.5 decades of 21st C gone so far? Smartphones, social media, online shopping, Google Maps, the human genome… Right enough, by 2030, we may yet be supplicant to fuelling the AI overlords.

What’s the time now?

Using your phone or computer, if it keeps its clock set to the network it’s attached to, is probably the most accurate way of telling the time. Try going to the website https://time.is if you want to check how close you are, really.

If you have Amazon Prime, there’s an interesting documentary, The Watchmaker’s Apprentice, which tells the story of George Daniels, arguably the greatest watchmaker of the 20th century, and his protégé Roger W Smith. Daniels is no longer with us, but Smith still hand-makes watches that will routinely sell for >$1M.

If you can get over the somewhat cloying narration of Gimli/Treebeard, it’s quite an good tale.

Morgan Freeman also narrated a series of science documentaries in 10+ years ago, which touched on time, light and space even posing the question of whether time even exists.

There are many time-related stories in Simon Garfield’s excellent Timekeepers book too.

There’s more horological chuntering to follow on Not Tip of the Week, another time…