How it began
Engineers at the Seikosha factory in Suwa built a quartz timepiece for a Nagoya broadcasting station in 1958, but it was the size of a filing cabinet. In 1959 Suwa Seikosha began a development effort called the 59A Project. It produced a marine chronometer, then a portable crystal chronometer used when Seiko timed the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and a wristwatch prototype in 1967. In 1968 the company's president asked for a commercial quartz watch within a year. A team led by Tsuneya Nakamura produced the Seiko Quartz Astron 35SQ, which went on sale in Tokyo on December 25, 1969.
Before it existed
The principle of quartz timekeeping had been known since Warren Marrison developed a quartz clock in the 1920s, and research on putting it to practical use went on in Switzerland, the United States and Japan. The main task was miniaturizing the mechanism. Mechanical watches depended on a hairspring, balance wheel and escapement. Battery-powered and tuning-fork watches had appeared in the 1950s and 1960, and Seiko ran a tuning-fork project in parallel before abandoning it.
How it works
A quartz crystal oscillating 8,192 times per second replaces the hairspring, balance wheel and escapement. A hybrid integrated circuit divides the oscillations, and a miniature stepping motor turns the hands. The watch runs on a small battery lasting more than a year. The Astron was accurate to within five seconds per month, which Seiko describes as about one hundred times better than standard mechanical watches of the day.
What changed first
The first Astron had an 18-karat gold case and was priced at 450,000 yen, or 1,250 dollars. About 100 were sold within a week. The New York Times reported on the watch on January 5, 1970. Seiko decided in 1970 to begin mass production and released a quartz watch with a liquid crystal digital display in 1973.
What lasted
By 1982 quartz watches made up more than 50 percent of world watch production. The IEEE milestone record credits the commercialization of the quartz wristwatch with accelerating the change from mechanical to electronic timekeeping and making exact time conveniently available to everyone. The IEEE dedicated a Milestone to the watch in Tokyo in 2004.
