Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in Volume 5 of B.H. Magazine. To get your copy (and access to future issues), subscribe here.
Just over 50 years ago, a watch powered by nothing more than a humble battery – and costing as much as a family car – shook the global watch industry to its core.
It was Christmas Day in 1969, and while the Swiss watch industry was wrapping presents and sharing fondue, Seiko debuted the now-legendary Astron in Tokyo. With its glittering,hand-finished gold case, the Astron ticked with a quartz movement that promised the kind of accuracy previously reserved for room-sized laboratory clocks.
But while the dawn of quartz timekeeping promised the world more accurate and affordable timepieces, its impact on the Swiss watchmaking industry would be enormous.
For over a century, Swiss watchmaking had grown increasingly specialised, with thousands of firms specifically dedicated to dials, cases, and different movement components, resulting in a sprawling network of companies that supplied each other. The industry’s structure was too broad to successfully respond to the innovations of quartz technology offered by adaptable, vertically integrated watchmakers in Japan. This led to what’s known as the “quartz crisis”.
What began with a few Swiss watchmaking businesses closing due to the drop in demand for mechanical watches, DEFCON 1 arrived when critical manufacturers, such as mainspring suppliers, closed their doors. The cascading effect was that other watchmakers were unable to source key components, forcing them to shutter as well.
Despite this inflexibility, Switzerland was also working on its own quartz technology at the same time, through a consortium of brands known as the Centre Electronique Horloger (CEH)that included Rolex, Patek Philippe, Omega, and dozens more. Production of Swiss-made quartz watches began just a few months after Seiko, but they were expensive to produce, thus expensive to purchase – Patek Philippe’s first quartz watches cost 60 per cent more than its perpetual calendar chronograph watches.
The result? Forty thousand jobs in the Swiss watch industry were lost, thousands of companies were closed down, and mechanical watchmaking was at risk of extinction. For many industry executives, this was a dark time in the history of horology. But now the attitude is shifting as the benefits of quartz watches are appreciated by the collecting cognoscenti.
“[The quartz crisis] pushed brands to think differently,” explains Emmanuel Gueit, one of the greatest watch designers alive today. “Because of quartz, the watch industry was democratised.”
A shining example of this is a collection Gueit recently designed to relaunch the Dennison watch brand, which closed down in the late 1960s (before the quartz crisis). “The main difference between quartz and mechanical movements is the thickness,” says Gueit. “When I first started speaking to the team at Dennison, they wanted to create a watch that was under CHF1,000, so I suggested we use a quartz movement.”
“We decided [this] because we wanted to make a very slim, flat watch that looked super luxurious, at a good price.”
And that was exactly what Gueit and the Dennison team achieved, debuting the ALD Collection that features hardstonedials (such as tiger’s eye, malachite, and lapis lazuli), a case that measures just 6.05mm thick, and an RRP of $1,095. When I first saw the collection, I was shocked at the price, wondering if there was a currency conversion mistake or if it was simply missing a zero.
“Just because it’s cheap doesn’t mean it needs to be ugly,” says Gueit. “The idea of making an affordable luxury watch is the future. Gen Z wants to have a luxurious watch, but an affordable luxury watch, and that’s the power of Dennison.”
Beyond the affordability of quartz watches, the fact that they keep accurate time for years is another benefit. While some mechanical watch collectors love the process of winding and setting their watch each morning, for other collectors who own dozens of watches, and more casual watch owners, there’s freedom in grabbing a timepiece on the way out the door.
“My wife prefers a quartz watch because she can’t be bothered winding it and setting it every time she wears it,” explains Phil Toledano, a conceptual artist, watch collector, and co-founder of watch brand Toledano & Chan. “I think [disliking quartz watches] might be the province of nerdy men who like winding the watch and setting the time, day, date, month, and moonphase. I never bother with any of it! I know some people who won’t even set the time; they’ll just put the watch on to wear the watch.”
He also believes the power of groupthink has something to do with the bad taste that quartz-powered watches leave in some collectors’ mouths.
“Most of our habits in life are things we just inherit from other people, and there’s nothing more habitual than collecting. So when you collect, the quickest way to sound knowledgeable is to assume the habits of other collectors, and one of those habits is to say, ‘quartz is no good’,” adds Toledano.
“There’s a kind of reflex people have to ask: ‘What’s the movement?’. But the number of people who actually care about a movement versus the number of people who say they do, I suspect, has a yawning abyss between them,” he laughs.
Toledano openly admits his collecting – be it cars, watches, or anything else – is predominantly focused on design quality, but it’s also fair to say that most watch collectors don’t have a particularly deep technical understanding of what it is that makes their timepiece tick. Especially as watches continue to penetrate deeper into mainstream culture, with lifestyle media covering celebrity watches and outfits in the same breath, the majority of watch enthusiasts are more casual about the pursuit than ever before.
Of course, the technical aspects of a watch still matter, and brands continue to pump R&D dollars into innovative wrist-worn complications, but many watch collectors simply love the act of wearing a thoughtfully designed, precision-engineered timepiece. The movement needs to be reliable, accurate, and offer a solid power reserve, but if you stop a banker on the street and ask them the movement number of their Laurent Ferrier, few would be able to provide a convincing answer.
“Unless [the movement] looks really interesting, I don’t really care. It’s like having a glass bonnet on your car – unless it’s a V12 with crazy intakes and a chrome manifold, who cares?” says Toledano.
“Most people don’t wear watches because of the mechanical aspect; they wear a watch because it says, ‘This is who I am’, or for some people, ‘This is what I’m worth’.”
Fast-forward 50-plus years from the quartz crisis, and we now see dozens of the world’s most coveted watchmakers embracing quartz technology, not only for its accuracy and practicality, but for the range of options a compact movement gives when it comes to designing watches.
The same executives who once scorned quartz now marvel at the technical sophistication of quartz technology, with watchmakers such as Cartier and TAG Heuer offering timepieces with advanced solar-cell dials that charge the battery within. Other names, such as Longines and Grand Seiko, are now selling watches that promise superlative accuracy of ± 10 seconds per year.
No longer a compromise, quartz is a statement – a demonstration that precision, longevity, and technological boldness can coexist alongside traditional craftsmanship. Mechanical watches may still reign supreme among traditionalists, but quartz has shed its reputation for cheap convenience, and stands shoulder-to-shoulder with its mechanical forebears.
The story of quartz is a study in technological disruption and reinvention. It tells the tale of an industry that refused to die, and instead embraced a seemingly existential threat to carve out an even more diverse future.
If the past fifty-plus years have taught us anything, it’s that in horology – as in life – the greatest leaps forward are born of challenge, not comfort.
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