One of the first movements that I began to hear a lot when I
was reading up on timepieces and how many automatic watches ran was the term
“Valjoux”.
It is one of the names I have heard many times and is a movement used in my timepieces, usually for chronograph movements.
Valjoux was a fabled movement maker and was part of the behemoth ASUAG group known today as Swatch Group.
The piece de resistance of the Valjoux movement is none
other than the ETA 7750.
How this movement was conceived tells an interesting tale.
At that time, Valjoux was a leader in the manual wind chronographs.
It had already produced the manual wind Valjoux 7733
movement which doing amicably well. In the 1970s, they wanted to spearhead a
development of a new movement, one which would be reliable and cost effective.
This movement is also acclaimed to be the first to have been designed with the
aid of a computer back in the seventies.
Sadly it was short lived, it did sell well in the beginning
with an estimated of around hundred thousand pieces in 1974. In the following
year, production stopped and this movement went bust. At that time, the demand
was so low that supplies lasted well into the eighties. Imagine if your Grandad
or dad actually bought those pieces when nobody actually wanted them, they
would have gotten them at a steal. Today you would be seating on a ‘goldmine’,
as the demand for automatic timepieces were somewhat resurrected, so the ETA
7750, somewhat like the phoenix rose from the ashes. (Thankfully the people of
ASUAG kept the dies and equipment so they could restart production seamlessly).
Thanks to its ingenious design, this was both durable and economical
to produce, along with great support from Swatch Group the 7750 became the most
movement in the Swiss automatic chronograph movement. It could be said to be
the most successful automatic chronograph movement, perhaps period.
Here are some of the brands out that which use this
fantastic movement in the timepieces; Breitling, Cyma, Hamilton, IWC, Mido,
Omega & Panerai to name a few.
