Seiko's quartz watch cost as much as a car and shook Switzerland
On sale in 1969, Seiko's Astron was the first quartz wristwatch anyone could buy, and it was priced about the same as a mid-sized car. Quartz soon became cheap, and the shift it began, later called the quartz crisis, sent the Swiss watch industry into a steep slump that lasted from the 1970s into the early 1980s.
Seiko started in 1881 as a Tokyo watch and jewellery shop run by Kintarō Hattori, who had been apprenticed to clockmakers since he was 13. He won exclusive supplies of imported timepieces through foreign trading firms in Yokohama, and their rarity drew customers enough to move him onto Ginza's main street. In 1892 he began making clocks under the name Seikosha, roughly house of exquisite workmanship; seikō also sounds like the Japanese word for success.
The brand name nearly came out differently. Watches finished in 1923 were provisionally called Glory, but that sounded like gorori, a Japanese word for tumbling over, which seemed unlucky, so mass production from 1924 carried the name Seiko. An unusual structure helped the company improve: two separate Hattori family firms built the watches, competing with each other and covering for each other if one ran short. Today Seiko is one of only two watchmakers, with Rolex, able to design and make every part in-house.
Firsts pile up in its history. Its first television advert, Japan's first ever, in 1953, ran only three seconds after a technician fumbled the equipment, so it was shown again that evening. A wardrobe-sized quartz clock supplied to a broadcaster in 1959 shrank to a portable, battery-powered chronometer for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. In 1968 Seiko's mechanical movements took fourth to tenth place at a Geneva Observatory accuracy contest, behind Swiss quartz entries.
The same year as the Astron, Seiko sold the first automatic chronograph to reach the market, beating a Zenith prototype. Later came a watch with a television in 1982 and, in 1999, Spring Drive, a mechanical movement with quartz-level accuracy. Its diving watches also went steadily deeper, from 300 metres of water resistance in 1967 to 1,000 in 1986.
Source: Seiko
