A brief history of quartz (1)

In less than three years, the watchmaking world was transformed by the likes of Ulysse Nardin and others which, as early as 1965, submitted prototype quartz watches to Neuchâtel Observatory for timing trials By the time the Basel fair opened in 1970, Seiko, Longines, CEH, Girard-Perregaux and Hamilton were in the starting-blocks with a commercially viable quartz watch In their defence, back in 1970 no-one could have expected engineers to foresee that mechanical watches, with their centuries of history, would be "Frozen out" by a quartz watch costing three to four times more, and in less than ten years.

Early analog quartz watches were still breaking news when already electronics engineers were developing the first watches to display time digitally, i.e with numbers formed by electrically charged diodes; the same technology used by IBM, Texas Instrument or Casio for their electronic calculators In these watches, a battery sends electricity to the quartz crystal via an electronic circuit that counts the crystal's vibrations and uses them to generate regular impulses.

Hamilton was first to launch a digital quartz watch, the Pulsar Time Computer, on May 6th 1970 Omega, Texas Instruments, Bulova, Citizen, Zenith Time and Waltham, among others, ploughed resources into LED watches, not knowing that a new type of display using field effect mode crystals was about to hasten the demise of all previous generations of quartz watch, starting with power-hungry LED displays. . Source