Seiko Astron and the Quartz Crisis

The Seiko Astron, launched in Tokyo in December 1969, was the first quartz watch on the market. It ran far more accurately than mechanical watches and soon became cheaper. In the 1970s and 1980s quartz watches knocked out large parts of the Swiss watch industry, in what is called the quartz crisis.

Facts

The quest for accuracy

Watchmakers have tried for centuries to make watches more accurate. The pendulum, which Huygens exploited in 1656, and then the spring in the balance wheel made clocks more accurate, and marine chronometers made it possible to fix position at sea. But a mechanical wristwatch still usually deviates by several seconds a day. After the war people wanted something better.

The solution was the quartz crystal. When a small piece of quartz is given current it vibrates at a very stable frequency, usually 32,768 times a second. The electronics divide the vibrations down to one pulse a second, and a small stepping motor moves the hand. The result is a watch that runs very accurately without a spring and balance wheel. The difference also shows on the dial: a quartz watch has a second hand that jumps once a second, whereas a mechanical watch has a hand that glides smoothly. It is a simple way to tell the two technologies apart, even for someone who has never opened a watch.

Seiko Astron

The Japanese firm Seiko, founded in 1881, had the first quartz wristwatch developed. The Seiko Quartz-Astron 35SQ was shown on 25 December 1969 in Tokyo. It cost 450,000 yen, about as much as a small car, and came in a gold case. The accuracy was about five seconds a month. The company that made the Astron had long built high-quality mechanical watches, and was timekeeper at the Tokyo Olympic Games of 1964, where quartz-based timing was used, which paved the way for the Astron.

The watch was itself a technical marvel but also an expensive prestige object, with only about a hundred examples in the first delivery. What made it historic was that it showed that quartz could sit on the wrist. Competition soon followed: in Switzerland a consortium answered in 1970 with the Beta 21, and in the United States Hamilton’s digital Pulsar followed in 1972.

The quartz crisis

The value of quartz watches lay in how easy they were to make. The parts soon became cheap, and with integrated circuits prices fell sharply. In the 1970s the market was filled with cheap Japanese and American quartz watches, and Swiss factories that made expensive mechanical watches lost customers quickly.

The consequences were severe. The number of employees in the Swiss watch industry fell from about 90,000 in 1970 to about 30,000 in the mid-1980s, and Switzerland lost its leading role as the world’s largest watch producer. That period is called the quartz crisis.

The answer and the legacy

Switzerland answered in two ways. One was cheap mass production, with Swatch in 1983, a plastic watch with only 51 parts. The other was to make mechanical watches into luxury: a movement seen as craft, not just timekeeping. Classic models like the Cartier Tank and the Omega Speedmaster gained a new value as cultural objects.

Japan continued in the direction of quartz with simple and good-value watches, like the Casio F-91W. Today the worlds of mechanical and quartz watches lie side by side: one is technology that counts, the other objects that tell a story. Read more about postwar technological optimism under the postwar period and about the space age.

How to recognise it

Exercise

What was the Seiko Astron of 1969?