A collaboration between

Matthias Liebe-Kleymann & Chuck Maddox

Based on a thread from 19 June 2002,

Last Revised: 18 May 2003, 11:12 GMT.

Certain Rights Reserved.

Top, In The Beginning,

The 1960s, The 1970s,

The 1980s, The 1990s,

Now and the future...

Addendum, Author's Notes,

Certain Rights Reserved

 The 1970s:

After 1969, while Heuer continued to produce and market manual wind and even quartz models, the main thrust of their efforts were with the newly introduced automatic movement Cal. 11/12 and later the Cal 15 was used.

Here is here how Heuer introduced the new Carrera in advertisement:

Well, truth is that Heuer didn't really “move” the crown. The Calibre 11 family was the first modular chronograph construction: a chronograph module made by Dubois-Depraz was attached to a Büren micro-rotor movement. To fit, the chronograph plate had to be rotated by 180 degrees. So the strange placement of crown and pushers was a technical necessity and not a tribute to the self-winding feature. So it was a change made out of necessity, not choice.

Jeff Stein, an avid Heuer collector, and as of February 13 2003 the owner of OnTheDash.com website discovered the "beta" version of this article and was kind enough to send the following scans for inclusion for this article:

-- click on the picture to open a full sized version of this picture in a new window...

-- click on the picture to open a full sized version of this picture in a new window...

Special thanks to Jeff Stein for his contribution to this article. I feel it adds greatly!

A search of information available on the race for the first automatic chronograph reveals several very useful articles available on the Internet. So we will not repeat those efforts in this article. Three very good articles are: 1969, World First Automatic Chronograph by Boon (no email address provided), The Race for the First Auto-Chrono Movement by Ignacio, and Christoph Ozdoba's A Brief History of the Automatic Chronograph.

A recent Heuer Valjoux 7750 acquisition by Chuck yielded a Heuer Automatic Chronograph Instruction Manual which covers both Heuer Valjoux 7750 Movement Chronographs and Micro-Rotor Movements. A portal to a web page with scans of this document follows:

Heuer Automatic Chronograph Instruction Manual:

The English language text begins on page 3 with a diagram for use with the Micro-Rotor movement on page 12.

Here are a couple of micro-rotor Carreras gleaned from the net: