The quartz watch

A quartz watch counts the vibrations of a quartz crystal driven by a battery, divides them down electronically, and uses the result to step the hands or change a digital display.^1, 2

Most quartz watches today use a crystal at 32,768 vibrations a second, which Wikipedia’s account dates to Girard-Perregaux’s calibre 350 of 1971.^1, 6

Warren Marrison built a quartz clock at Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1927, driving a synchronous motor through a frequency divider, and time laboratories went on to use quartz until atomic clocks replaced it.^1, 7, 8

Such clocks filled cabinets. Seiko’s, built in 1958 for a Nagoya broadcaster, was the size of a filing cabinet.^2, 10

According to Wikipedia’s account, what made a wristwatch possible was cheap integrated circuits from the 1960s, and later low-power MOS chips that let a coin cell run a watch for about a year.¹

The Swiss Centre Electronique Horloger, founded in Neuchâtel in 1962, began its quartz wristwatch project in 1965 and made its own integrated circuits.^{3, 11, 12}

A CEH researcher records that its Beta 1 prototype of July 1967 used an 8,192 Hz crystal, a fourteen-stage divider and a stepping motor, and that Beta 2 used a vibrating motor driven at 256 Hz.^11, 12

CEH prototypes set new records at the 1967 Neuchâtel Observatory competition, where Seiko also entered quartz wristwatches.^2, 3

Seiko and the IEEE say Seiko sold the first quartz wristwatch, the Quartz Astron, on 25 December 1969; it used an 8,192 Hz crystal and a stepping motor.^1, 2, 10

The Swiss Beta 21 followed on 10 April 1970, sold under many Swiss brands.^3, 11

Digital displays came next: Hamilton’s Pulsar with red LEDs, announced in 1970 and sold from 1972, then liquid-crystal displays from 1972 and 1973, which needed far less power.^{4, 12, 13, 14}

Semiconductor firms such as Texas Instruments, Fairchild and National Semiconductor mass-produced digital quartz watches, and prices fell from $2,100 for the gold Pulsar to under $20 for a Texas Instruments LCD watch in 1976.^{4, 6, 12, 14}

Seiko says it disclosed many of its quartz patents and that other makers adopted its method, and that its twin-quartz temperature correction of 1978 cut the annual error to five seconds.¹⁰

Quartz watches overtook mechanical ones in popularity by about 1978 to 1980, and by the 1980s quartz dominated the wristwatch market.^{1, 6, 12, 15}