While both automatic winding and chronographs have predecessors from long before, automatic wristwatches have been in mass manufacture since the 1920's to early 1930's and the chronograph watch achieved its modern form at about the same time. Regardless of precise history, it's clear that both technologies were mature for decades before the first automatic chronographs appeared in the late 1960's.

Why was this hard? What's the technical difficulty? To my naive eye, the works for enabling, disabling, resetting and powering the chronograph complications are entirely separable from the power source and winding mechanisms, but if that was the case, presumably we would have seen automatic chronographs much earlier.

I'm going to find any claims that "maybe nobody thought of it" or "maybe manufacturers just didn't think there was a market" to require extraordinary proof. Both automatic watches and chronograph watches were quite popular in the decades from the 30s through the 60s, and the watch industry was highly competitive and innovative. The idea that nobody ever tried this, despite it being straightforward, strains my credibility.

 

It was done in 1947 already...by Lemania. Why did this particular beauty not go forth? Apparantly because the Omega board decided against it (bumper noise giving the impression of a defective movement, extra bulk required for automatic + chronograph was not 'fashionable' at the time etc etc).

 

It strains your credulity, not your credibility.

 

Hah, you are correct, although my error might strain both.

Fascinating, I didn't know this, and always got sucked in by the narrative around who was the "first" to ship an automatic chronograph in 1969. Still leaves me wondering if there was a technical challenge or if it was just a market issue: is there anything hard about it, or is it just deciding to build a watch with both complications?

 

In the 1950s and 1960s chronographs really were "tool" watches. You only bought one because you needed to time things. They were not a fashion item and already a bit chunky. Expensive too, compared to time only watches. Automatics were rather unusual also being expensive, but rather more stylish. Add the cost of both complications and that's a real niche market. In fact I didn't know that automatics existed in any form when I was already wearing a hand-wound chronograph 50 years ago.

I can imagine some technical questions for the designers: will the automatic winder cope with the extra power the mainspring needs to run the chronograph? the whole assembly is going to be pretty thick and fashion of the previous 30 years has been to go thinner? manufacturing techniques have been improving and costs reducing but by enough? and a biggie, electronic watches and timing equipment are already here, as are integrated circuits, would it be better to go down that route?

 

@eugeneandresson : Thanks for posting those pictures. I’ve always been curious about that watch.

The base CH 27 movement they used for this appears to be little modified from their standard CH 27 from the same time period, apart from the higher finishing they applied to their experiment.


(1945-46 production — sorry, photo is from before service)

I bet the bumper bang in that Lemania automatic chrono, each time that substantial rotor hit the end of its travel, was a lot bigger than the comparable Seamaster bumper, and the bumper wobble on your wrist greater too.

 

Same thing I guess for Omega itself into the 90's...why no love for the Mk40?

 

was this commercially available in 1947?

what was that competition in 1969 among Zenith, Heuer and Seiko all about?