The “quartz crisis” began in Tokyo on Christmas Day in 1969 when Seiko unveiled the world’s first quartz watch, the Astron 35SQ. Designed by Kazunari Sasaki of Suwa Seiko-sha, the Astron achieved 100 times the accuracy of a regular mechanical watch by using a vibrating quartz crystal instead of a balance wheel for time keeping. Although the Astron originally cost ¥450,000 the same as a Toyota Corolla at the time — over the next 30 years, the price would to drop to where a perfectly serviceable quartz watch, keeping time to within five minutes a year, can now be had for $10.
While quartz technology brought accurate time within the reach of everyone, it would create a catastrophe for the Swiss watchmaking industry. Because Switzerland stayed neutral during World War II, the watch industry was unaffected, unlike other nations that shifted their watchmaking industry to timers for military ordinance. From 1945 until the early 1970s, the Swiss were able to capitalize on what was a virtual monopoly, accounting for more than 50 percent of the world watch market. All this changed with the advent of cheap and accurate quartz crystals; in the two decades following introduction of the Astron, the number of skilled workers employed by the Swiss watch industry fell from 90,000 to 28,000. Hence, what was a quartz crisis for the Swiss was a quartz revolution elsewhere, especially Japan, where companies such as Seiko, Citizen and Casio thrived.
Quartz crystals used in watches depend on the piezoelectric effect, discovered in 1880 by French physicists, brothers Jacques and Pierre Curie. Squeeze a crystal and it will generate a tiny electric current; pass electricity through it and it will deform. (The word comes from Greek piezein, meaning to squeeze.) Today, the piezoelectric industry accounts for $2 billion in annual business, thanks to its use in inkjet printers, gas wands and lighters, guitar and drum pick-ups, microbalances, atomic-scale microscopes and much more.
If you’re wearing a watch, chances are that inside, safe within a tiny capsule, there’s a little quartz crystal (about 1/10 of an inch long) in the shape of a tuning fork. When a miniscule current is applied, it vibrates at a constant 32,768 times per second, or hertz. That frequency isn’t just a random number — the size, shape and plane on which the crystal is cut determines it. Why 32,768? It’s 2 to the 15th. Halve it with a “flip-flop” circuit and you get 16,384; do that 14 more times via a series of flip-flops and you get a once-a-second pulse. If you have an analog quartz watch (with hands), you’ll see the secondhand jumping forward in one-second increments.
The frequency of the quartz crystal largely determines its accuracy. The original Astron vibrated at 8,192 hertz (2 to the 13th), and was accurate to within one minute per year. Following the Astron, watches have incorporated higher frequencies (mostly 32,768 hertz) with a corresponding increase in accuracy. Other key advances included replacement of the analog hands with a digital face, originally LED (light-emitting diode) and later LCD (liquid crystal display).
It took awhile for the Swiss watchmaking industry to recover from the quartz crisis/revolution, but a glance at the advertising pages of any glossy magazine aimed at the upper crust will tell you what happened. The surviving firms (other than Swatch — another story) went for the top 1 percent of society with fancy — very fancy — mechanical watches. We’re talking thousands of dollars for a Rolex to $1 million and beyond for, say, a handmade Patek Philippe or Greubel Forsey (Google “tourbillon” for a glimpse into another world). I doubt their well-heeled owners wear them every day — I can imagine no greater invitation to being mugged. They probably wear cheapo $10,000 Rolex Explorers on the street. Or one of those 10-buck beauties from Amazon.
Next week, we’ll look at a watch that keeps time to within one second per year.
Barry Evans (he/him, barryevans9@yahoo.com), who goes wristwatch-free, is rarely late.
This article appears in Burger Week 2021.
Given that Seiko pipped the Swiss to the quartz post by only a matter of months, and that prices of quartz watches remained firmly in luxury watch territory for a fair while, you could argue that it wasn’t the Japanese theat started the quartz revolution but the Americans, with their production of cheaper circuitry that finally allowed for the democratisation of reliable, accurate time.
And when you say that Swatch is a conversation for another time, let’s actually stop on that one for a moment. The Swiss may have built the bulk of their watch making capability in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by mass producing fakes English and French watches, and then – as you say – protecting their industry during the War by ostensibly remaining ‘neutral’, but what you saw during much of the 20th century was a mechanical watch industry that (a few luxury maisons aside) was simply churning out fairly low quality, ‘affordable’ time pieces. By and large, these were the equivalent of some of the mass produced Chinese mechanical watches that you can pick up off Amazon, today, for about 20.
It was little wonder that the Swiss luxury watch industry started looking at quartz. There had already been some successful forays into tuning fork technology and into electric mechanical watches and, by the mid 1960s, it was firmly believed that advanced technology was the path ahead for savvy consumers with deep pockets. They kept this going right through the 1970s, with just about every major luxury brand making their own quartz watch. That they didn’t predict the fall in component price was unfortunate for them but it only served to highlight the problem with the Swiss mechanical watch industry: no-one really, truly wanted ‘affordable’ mechanical watches that were old-fashioned, kept (relatively) poor time, were fragile and needed frequent servicing. When the alternative was one of those reliable, accurate, fancy quartz watches that until recently were reserved for only the rich? Well, people voted with their wallets.
And that’s where Swatch came in. This was the second revolution that was kicked off by the rise of quartz. A cheap, plastic ‘Second Watch’ from a Swiss maker that had a quartz movement at its core. The shift in focus from luxury quartz to mass consumer quartz, however, is not the revolution that I am talking about. Rather the upheaval of what remained of the Swiss mechanical watch industry and its desperate refocus on producing better watches – and using all that money so ironically brought in from the mass production of cheap, quartz watches, to fund one of the greatest deceptive marketing campaign in history, so that, by the end of the 20th century, pretty much the whole world would be happy to believe that Switzerland was the spiritual home of watch making and that Swiss luxury watches were (and always had been) the best in the world.
The story to leave for another time is the rise of the German watch makers. Their industry was just as obliterated by war as was English watch making, but while the latter would struggle to regain any sort of foothold in the market (British brands still like to ‘boast’ that they use Swiss movements), the former would establish itself as one of the world’s preeminent forces of luxury watch production.
Thats fascinating, Tom, wish I had you to consult with when I was researching this column!