The electric and quartz revolution

The early battery watches still kept time like mechanical ones, with a balance wheel and hairspring; the battery took the place of the mainspring. Seiko describes Hamilton’s watch of 1957 in exactly those terms.^1, 14

Elgin in the United States and Lip in France both showed electric wristwatches in public on 19 March 1952; the Swiss historical dictionary dates Swiss electric models to the same year.^{1, 7, 9, 22}

Wikipedia and the NAWCC Bulletin say Hamilton of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was the first to put one on sale, the Electric 500, in 1957.^{1, 9, 10, 23}

Hamilton gave its electric watches unusual asymmetric cases. The best known is the triangular Ventura, designed by Richard Arbib.^{10, 24, 25}

Bulova’s Accutron, on sale from the autumn of 1960, did away with the balance wheel. A small tuning fork vibrating 360 times a second, kept going by a transistor circuit, drove the hands.^{2, 11, 18, 23}

It was the work of Max Hetzel, a Swiss engineer working for Bulova from the early 1950s; the Science Museum in London records him as its designer.^{2, 11, 18}

Bulova guaranteed the Accutron to within a minute a month, and says it was the first tuning-fork electronic watch.^2, 27

Seiko says the Accutron shocked the watch industry and set off a race for electronic accuracy, and a researcher at the Swiss laboratory founded in 1962 writes that the Accutron was one of the threats behind it.^14, 28

Accutron movements went into space hardware too: the National Air and Space Museum holds a Bulova timer with an Accutron movement of the kind used on Skylab in 1973 and 1974.²⁹

Quartz timekeeping was not new. Warren Marrison built a quartz clock at Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1927, and by the 1940s the time laboratories had moved to quartz. The problem was making one small enough to wear.^{31, 32, 33}

In Switzerland the industry founded a shared laboratory, the Centre Electronique Horloger, or CEH, in Neuchâtel in 1962, to design a new generation of electronic wristwatches.^{4, 7, 18, 19}

In Japan, Seiko’s Suwa Seikosha began its 59A project in 1959, compared balance, tuning-fork and quartz designs, and chose quartz. It built a quartz clock for a Nagoya broadcaster in 1958 and quartz timers for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics; Seiko and Longines both showed quartz pocket-watch prototypes in 1966.^{3, 14, 19, 23}

Both took quartz wristwatches to the Neuchâtel Observatory competition in 1967, and the CEH prototypes set new records there, with errors of a few tenths of a second a day.^3, 4, 28

A CEH researcher’s account puts the best Swiss entries well ahead of Seiko’s four quartz watches that year. Wikipedia’s account says the observatory competitions came to an end with quartz; the last year is not settled in the sources.^28, 36

Seiko put the Quartz Astron 35SQ on sale in Tokyo on 25 December 1969. Seiko and the IEEE describe it as the first quartz wristwatch; the Swiss prototypes were earlier but were not sold.^3, 7, 14

It was a luxury object: 450,000 yen, in an 18-carat gold case, and about a hundred sold in its opening week.^{3, 14, 18, 37}

Seiko says Bulova’s habit of keeping its tuning-fork patents to itself held back the Accutron, so Seiko disclosed much of its own quartz patent portfolio, and other makers adopted its method.¹⁴

The Swiss answer was the Beta 21, the industrial version of a CEH prototype. An initial thousand went on sale on 10 April 1970 at the Basel fair, under the names of Swiss brands including Omega, Patek Philippe, Rolex and Piaget.^{4, 23, 28}

Accounts differ on how many brands carried it: sixteen by the IEEE’s count, eighteen exhibitors by Wikipedia’s, about twenty by a CEH researcher’s, who puts the total made at about 6,000 before the joint movement was dropped.^{4, 23, 28}

Hamilton announced the Pulsar in 1970: a watch with no moving parts that showed the time in red light-emitting diodes at the press of a button. It went on sale in 1972, in an 18-carat gold case at $2,100; the NAWCC Bulletin dates its release to 1971.^{5, 13, 18, 25, 39}

Its electronics came from Electro-Data of Garland, Texas. The Computer History Museum says the early version, with 44 chips, was notoriously unreliable until RCA engineers reduced its timekeeping circuit to one chip.^5, 13

Liquid-crystal displays followed in 1972 and 1973, from Microma and Seiko among others. They used far less power, showed the time all the time, and replaced the LED.^{5, 13, 14, 18, 40}

Chip makers moved into watches: Fairchild, National Semiconductor, Mostek, Litronix and Texas Instruments, while Intel bought Microma, whose 1974 watch put the whole circuit on a single chip.^{5, 18, 19, 40}

Prices collapsed. Texas Instruments sold a digital watch for about $20 and then about $10, in 1975 and 1976 by Wikipedia’s dates or in 1976 by the Computer History Museum’s, in what the museum calls a battle of attrition.^5, 23

The American chip makers did not stay. TIME reported in 1981 that Texas Instruments had abandoned the field, unable to match the Japanese marketing push, and Intel’s Gordon Moore later called Microma a 15-million-dollar failure.^{18, 40, 42}

Japanese makers took up quartz in force: Seiko’s six-digit LCD watch in 1973, Citizen’s quartz wristwatch of 1973 and its light-powered Crystron Solar Cell of 1976, and Casio’s Casiotron, built on its calculator chips, in November 1974.^{14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 43, 44}

Citizen began selling movements to other makers under the Miyota name in 1980, and from 1979 exported electronic movements in bulk to a Hong Kong assembler.^6, 15

Costs fell fast. According to a study cited by the business historian Pierre-Yves Donzé, the average cost of making a quartz watch in Japan was about 52,000 yen in 1973 and under 6,000 yen in 1980.⁶

Hong Kong factories began assembling electronic watches in 1974 and 1975. By 1976 Hong Kong made 4 million quartz watches, second to Japan, and its registered watch factories rose from 237 in 1975 to 1,187 in 1980.^6, 46

Donzé records that Hong Kong firms did not make the chips: by the end of the 1970s the circuits came from Oki, NEC, Intersil and Litronix, and the displays from Siemens, Beckman, Fairchild, Motorola, Hitachi and others.⁶

By 1978 Hong Kong exported more electronic watches than anywhere else. Electronic watches were 68 per cent of its watch exports by value in 1980 and 95 per cent in 1990, and overproduction brought price cuts and closures in the mid-1980s.^{6, 19, 46}

The Swiss historical dictionary says the Swiss had mastered quartz but did not believe in it, and were overtaken by Japanese producers. Quartz and mechanical watches drew level around 1978 to 1980.^7, 19

Swiss watch employment fell by more than half, though the counts differ: from about 70,000 in the mid-1960s to 30,000 to 35,000 in the 1980s by the Swiss historical dictionary, from 90,000 in 1970 to 34,000 by 1984 by swissinfo, and to 28,000 in 1988 by Wikipedia’s account.^{7, 19, 47}

Why the Swiss industry fell so far is debated. The Swatch Group blames recession and cheap Asian quartz; the historian Pierre-Yves Donzé argues that the usual story of quartz and cheap labour is too simple, and that Swiss production methods were already losing to Japanese ones.^{6, 20, 48}

The Swiss historical dictionary records that federal aid for the watch regions followed the crisis in 1978, and that in 1984 Neuchâtel’s research bodies, the CEH among them, merged into the Swiss Centre for Electronics and Microtechnology.⁷

The two largest Swiss groups, SSIH and ASUAG, came near insolvency and merged in 1983, the year the plastic quartz Swatch went on sale. That story is told under the quartz crisis and the Swatch Group.^{7, 19, 20}

American watchmaking shrank. Hamilton closed its Lancaster factory in 1969 and moved production to Switzerland, its watch brand passed to the Swiss SSIH, and the Pulsar name went to Seiko in 1978.^39, 49