YESTERDAY'S NEWS

rom the revolutionary quartz movement to the intricate tourbillon and the game-changing automatic movement, we take a look at some of watchmaking’s most transformative milestones.

- COLIN GOMEZ

Throughout the history of watchmaking, there have been a great number of innovations that have changed the way the industry would go on to operate forever. Man’s obsession with time bled into his obsession with the instrumentations of its measurement—resulting in all methods and manner of demarcating, manipulating, and amplifying the minutiae of its characteristics.

Characteristics that, lest we forget, we invented in the first place to help us give order to a concept so abstract and yet so pertinent to our way of living. As we take a jaunt through the history of horology, we harken back to the introduction of the quartz movement in 1969 by Seiko, an innovation that at the time seemed to spell the end for mechanical watchmaking.

THE QUARTZ MOVEMENT

A seismic shift in the watchmaking landscape, the introduction of the quartz movement brought the entire Swiss watchmaking industry to its knees, with many once profitable and renowned Swiss watch houses becoming insolvent or seemingly vanishing overnight. It was, to put it in no uncertain terms, a period of great upheaval for Swiss watchmakers. Between 1970 and 1983, the number of Swiss watchmakers dropped from 1,600 to just 600, and in the period between 1970 and 1988, Swiss watch employment was reduced by more than two-thirds.