The Quartz Crisis

A cheaper, less charming machine arrived. The incumbents diagnosed it correctly. Two thirds of them lost their jobs anyway.On Christmas Day 1969, Seiko put a watch on sale in Tokyo called the Astron. It cost roughly as much as a modest car, kept time to within about five seconds a month, and contained a small vibrating sliver of quartz instead of three hundred years of accumulated Swiss judgement. The Swiss watch industry looked at it and reached a verdict that was, on the merits, entirely correct. The thing had no soul. No escapement to regulate, no balance wheel breathing away at five beats a second, no craft, no patience, no lineage. A watch is not a timer. A watch is an heirloom that happens to tell the time. Within fifteen years, Swiss watchmaking employment had fallen from roughly 90,000 to under 30,000. The number of firms went from something like 1,600 to something like 600. Switzerland's share of the world's watches fell from about half to a small fraction of that. The…