![]() When you go to design school-which I haven’t-I imagine day one of design boot camp goes a little something like this: there’s a drill instructor, but they’re wearing Yeezys, and they scream at all the new recruits until one thing and one thing alone has stuck-that design should never get in the way of its own purpose. I know it’s just the number one, which is pretty easy to remember, but it’s still annoying. Now, fine, they want to show off that their chronograph does what very few others can, and I get that, but when the massive great line of text takes up a sixth of the available space and in doing so actually makes the instrument harder to use because it replaces one of the numbers on the scale, that’s annoying. It’s very hard to measure a tenth of a second with a watch that only ticks every eighth.Įnter Zenith’s El Primero, which beats 36,000 times per hour-as it says discreetly on the dial-which is, of course, ten times per second-as it says not so discreetly on the bezel. With our metric system, the next unit down from seconds is the tenth of a second, and-clue’s in the name-there are ten of them per second. And, since humans are prone to gambling, it won’t surprise you to learn that one of the very first chronograph mechanisms was built to determine whose horse had won.Īnd when those differences are split by the merest of moments, well-that’s when you need to slice up a second into more digestible chunks. ![]() The very fact that humans aren’t particularly good at keeping accurate time beyond knowing it’s roughly midday and close to lunch is why the chronograph was invented in the first place. ![]() So what, right? Not like you can see something happening eight or ten times per second to distinguish the difference. That means, per second, it ticks ten times, twice more per second than your typical watch. If you’re familiar with the history of Zenith’s El Primero calibre, you’ll know it was not only one of the first chronographs that could wind itself, but also the first that had a high beat as well. ![]()
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