The Big Time

The digital watch turns 50.

Inside a workshop in Garland in northern Texas, one of the great problems of watchmaking was being pored over by an engineer named George H Thiess. It was the late 1960s, a period dominated by the space race and visions of steel and glass and neon-hued utopia, of flying cars, dinner in a pill and great technological leaps.

Meanwhile, over 1,400 miles away in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, John M Bergey, the head of research and development at the Hamilton Watch Company, an American watchmaking powerhouse, was trying to solve the same issue. But he and his crack team of engineers had hit a wall. How, Bergey asked, can you shrink a digital clock down to the size of a wristwatch?

For years, watch manufacturers and the engineers employed by them had wanted to stamp their name on the future of the craft, to create a watch with unparalleled accuracy, clarity and futuristic performance. Analogue watches had existed for centuries and the digital clock, with digits rather than hands, since 1956. Hamilton had made the world’s first electric watch with a traditional dial and hands in 1957, the Hamilton Electric 500. But the next leap, digits on your wrist powered by solid-state computer tech, in which there are no moving parts, was yet to be perfected.