Seiko

The shop sold and repaired clocks and grew by wholesaling timepieces bought from foreign trading houses in Yokohama. By 1894 it had a corner building with a clock tower in Ginza, on the site of today’s SEIKO HOUSE.^1, 2, 6

In 1892 Hattori turned to making clocks himself. His Seikosha factory, set up with the engineer Tsuruhiko Yoshikawa and named after the Japanese word for precise, made wall clocks, then pocket watches from 1895 and the Laurel wristwatch in 1913. The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 burned down the factory and the shop; the company rebuilt, and in 1924 launched the SEIKO brand.^1, 2, 7

Watchmaking was later split between two group companies: Daini Seikosha, spun off in 1937 and now Seiko Instruments, and Suwa Seikosha, formed in 1959 from the Suwa factory and now Seiko Epson. Both made Grand Seiko models and both entered the Swiss observatory competitions under their own names. The Ginza shop became Wako in 1947.^{1, 8, 9, 10}

From the late 1950s Seiko stopped copying foreign watches and designed its own: the Marvel of 1956, the Crown and, in 1960, the watch that became Grand Seiko. It timed the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and its movements placed second and third at the Neuchâtel observatory competition in 1967 and led the mechanical wristwatch results at Geneva in 1968.^{8, 10, 14}

Quartz grew out of the same work: a quartz clock for a broadcaster in 1958, quartz timers for the 1964 Games, a wristwatch prototype in 1967. On December 25, 1969, Seiko began selling the Quartz Astron, which it and the IEEE describe as the first quartz wristwatch sold to the public. It then opened much of its quartz patent portfolio to other makers, and quartz spread through the industry in the quartz crisis.^3, 4, 15

Electronic watches of many kinds followed: a six-digit LCD watch in 1973, a solar watch in 1977, the Kinetic, which makes its electricity from the wearer’s movement, in 1988, and Spring Drive, a mainspring movement regulated by a quartz oscillator, in 1999. In 2012 the Astron name returned on a solar watch that sets itself from GPS satellites.^1, 3, 16