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Many people with a passion for fine mechanical wristwatches own one or more chronographs. As a rule, these are sporty analog men's wristwatches, but various types of chronographs can also be found in aircraft, on ships, and elsewhere. What they all have in common is the ability to function as a stopwatch in addition to telling the "normal" time.
A "Time Writer"
The term chronograph has its roots in Ancient Greek and translates literally as something like "time writer." In other words, it is a watch that can be used to measure specific intervals of time. Incidentally, chronographs should not be confused with chronometers. While the latter are distinguished by particularly high, certified accuracy, they by no means always have a stop function. Depending on their intended use, their design, or any complications, different types of chronographs can be distinguished.
When people talk about a chronograph today, they usually mean a wristwatch equipped with this function. In the lower and mid-price segments, chronographs for men and women typically have a quartz movement. Higher-end models, all the way up to the luxury segment, are usually fitted with a self-winding movement and are therefore also called automatic chronographs.
External Features: Pushers and Additional Dials
In many cases, chronographs can be distinguished from other watches at first glance. That's because the main dial usually features additional smaller dials, known as subdials or totalizers. When timing an event, they display, for example, the elapsed minutes or hours. The seconds, on the other hand, are usually shown by a hand on the main dial whose design generally resembles the seconds hand of a classic three-hand watch. So that the running seconds of the time of day can still be displayed during timing, a hand on one of the subdials usually takes over this function. Another typical feature of many automatic chronographs for men and women is the pair of buttons, or "pushers," arranged next to the crown: the upper one serves as the start/stop button, while pressing the lower one returns the large chronograph seconds hand on the main dial to its starting position at 12 o'clock after timing.
Who Invented It?
The question of who can be considered the inventor of the first chronograph is often hotly debated, and many different names come up in this context. The fact is that efforts in this direction were made repeatedly as early as the 18th century, and that several people made significant contributions through their various inventions to the development of the type of watch we know today as the chronograph.
The first recognized model in history is considered to be an astronomical timepiece by Louis Moinet, begun in 1815 and completed the following year: the so-called "compteur de tierces." This watch featured a central hand indicating sixtieths of a second, push buttons for starting and stopping a measurement, and a reset function. However, early precursors had been developed a few decades earlier, including a model with a stoppable seconds hand. With that design, though, the entire movement was halted when stopping, so the periods of standstill while measuring intermediate times had to be added up at the end.
The Breakthrough: Timing Seconds While the Movement Keeps Running
Another milestone in the evolution from watches with simple stop functions to the full-fledged chronograph came in 1831. That year, the Austrian Joseph Thaddäus Winnerl – an employee of the Breguet manufacture – succeeded in building a watch whose seconds hand could be stopped separately. Winnerl later even invented a timepiece with two superimposed seconds hands that could be stopped one after the other. The time measured in this way was calculated as the difference.
Technically, this required two separate but coupled stop mechanisms. This complication is also known as the split-seconds, rattrapante, or double chronograph. When Adolphe Nicole invented the so-called "heart cam" in 1844, which allows a hand to be reset to zero at the push of a button, he finally paved the way for the first full-fledged chronograph pocket watch, which was presented to the public in 1862. As wristwatches became more widespread, interest in models with a stopwatch function in this format grew as well.
From 1933 onward, the solution developed by Breitling increasingly prevailed, in which two separate pushers handle start/stop and reset to zero, respectively. Chronographs working on this principle allow the chronograph hand to be stopped and restarted multiple times.
The Automatic Chronograph: Sophisticated Engineering for Reliable Performance
Once automatic watches had increasingly established themselves as an alternative to hand-wound mechanical watches, producing self-winding chronographs was the logical next step. Although Albert Piguet had already developed the prototype with automatic winding in 1946, it would take more than two decades before the first series-produced automatic chronograph for men came onto the market.
Zenith/Movado achieved this in January 1969, beating its competitors Breitling/Heuer and Seiko, who had also been working on such projects. To emphasize its pioneering role, Zenith/Movado named its pioneer "El Primero," which translates as "the first." Only a short time later, the rise of quartz watches threatened to drive these mechanical masterpieces off the market, but the renewed interest in fine mechanical watches from the mid-1980s onward opened up new prospects for mechanical chronographs as well.
Today, the automatic chronograph is far more widespread than hand-wound mechanical timepieces. The main reason is likely that automatic winding is generally very popular in fine wristwatches, as it spares the owner both regular manual winding and the occasional battery purchase.
Complex Engineering Combined in the Smallest Space
Manufacturing an automatic chronograph places particularly high demands on the watchmakers' craftsmanship. After all, within the typically rather limited space of a wristwatch case, they must fit not only a chronograph movement that is considerably more complex than a simple movement, but also the automatic winding system with its rotor, which is likewise more elaborate than conventional manual winding.
Probably the most successful self-winding chronograph movement is the Valjoux 7750 caliber from ETA, which is offered in several variants and today reliably powers the majority of automatic wristwatches. Other well-known automatic chronograph movements include the in-house caliber 4130 from Rolex and the Lemania 5100, which, however, is no longer produced.
Some mechanical chronographs have become true icons of watchmaking history and have been produced virtually unchanged for decades. These include, for example, Omega's Speedmaster, famously known as the "Moonwatch", and the Rolex Oyster Perpetual Cosmograph Daytona, which is highly coveted by many collectors, especially in its stainless steel version.
The fascination that automatic chronographs for men, such as these and other models, hold for each new generation of watch enthusiasts should ensure that the automatic chronograph will not lose its following, even in the age of smartphones and smartwatches with stopwatch functions.
