SJX Watches
Insight: The Modern Performance Chronograph Movement
High-end chronograph movements of today tend to have in common a vertical clutch and column wheel. Such “performance” chronographs are typically also automatic, and practically every high-end watchmaker, from Audemars Piguet to Vacheron Constantin, has its own take on the modern “performance” chronograph. The chronograph movement as we know it today is actually a fairly recent invention. Despite being common in today’s chronograph constructions, the vertical coupling, or at least its concept, is decades-old. The Pierce cal. 130/134 launched in the 1930s is regarded as the first commercially available wristwatch with a vertical clutch. There are examples of even older stopwatches that relied on crude forms of the vertical clutch, but most were either prototypes or small-batch production. But the large-scale use of the vertical clutch only started in the late 1960s, when Seiko debuted the cal. 6139. Launched in 1969, the Seiko cal. 6139 was a vertical clutch movement produced on an industrial scale. Not only was it among the first-ever automatic chronographs, but the cal. 6139 also was objectively the most advanced amongst them. Compared to the modular construction of the Breitling-Heuer Chronomatic Caliber 11 and the fairly classical architecture of the Zenith El Primero, the Seiko cal. 6139 was endowed with a vertical clutch and a novel construction all around. It was, however, an industrial, no-frills movement at heart. The one that started it all – the cal. ...
