How SHOULD Automatic Watch Lovers Feel About Quartz Movements Today?

Automatic watches have an intricately-driven mechanical heart, while quartz movements are cheap, soulless silicon brains that should be viewed with derision by “real” watch lovers.

This is how most automatic and manual winding mechanical watch aficionados view quartz watches. This is in spite of the fact that quartz movements are almost universally less expensive and better timekeepers than mechanical watches – and often by an exponential degree. It is not an overstatement to say that a favorable mention of a quartz timepiece is capable of stirring anger in the heart of a mechanical movement lover.

I get it — some people (including myself) and watch enthusiasts prefer balance wheels, hairsprings, mainsprings, escapements, and gear trains over a watch battery, microchip and quartz crystal oscillator. But is it inappropriate for mechanical watch lovers to make room in their hearts for a quartz watch or two? BlumSafe makes its livelihood from producing wall safes specifically designed for owners of automatic types of watches, but I feel it is fair to pay quartz its due.

First, a little history about the quartz-mechanical movement relationship, and why some of the old-timers (no pun intended) have such an emotional prejudice against quartz. Basically, during the 1970s, when the quartz movement was first commercialized, its introduction led to the near-death experience of the mechanical watch industry.

The Seiko Astron 3500 – the quartz movement that started it all in 1969.
The introduction of quartz watches as the simplest, default time-telling implement meant that there was no longer a purpose in life for the lowest priced mechanical movement watches – as quartz could do it cheaper with much greater accuracy (recall, we did not have smartphones back then to tell us the time – it was either wristwatches or wall clocks, making a watch almost a necessity and not simply an optional wrist-worn curiosity).

Mid-level watchmakers like Breitling also found trouble finding their place, and barely scraped by (not a bad thing for Sinn-lovers like myself – Sinn was able to license the iconic Navitimer design from a near-bankrupt Breitling for some much-needed cash).

The higher-end watchmakers like Rolex, Patek, and Audemars Piguet were most successful in adapting, by turning they’re fine watches into luxury watches and products through marketing and price increases. Mass produse prices on many of these watch brands have gone up exponentially in real terms over the past 20-30 years (but so have the price of another luxury good, fine handbags, my wife reminds me).

Bottom line — the era that introduced quartz watches en masse resulted in the effective death of many great watchmakers (even if, in some cases, the brand name lives on today like a zombie), such as Doxa, Elgin, Waltham, Universal Geneve and Wittnauer, and – almost – the end of a great industry.

So we have the much easier-to-manufacture quartz electronic movement, with fewer parts than a mechanical movement. Almost by necessity, this results in a big price differential between the types of movements, where quartz can wholesale at $10-50 a movement vs $150-500 or more for a mechanical one. You begin to understand how a unique or interesting, well-designed quartz can have relative appeal to a fashion watch buyer today – that is, not a buyer who needs to be able to see turning gears through a sapphire exhibition case back, though certain quartz movements have their own technological appeal, as described below.

When one combines the price of a quartz movement with the revolution in the often-outsourced watch design, manufacturing and distribution chain, quartz turns into a facilitator of aesthetic and functional watch innovation. This level of innovation is simply not often economically feasible with mechanical movements. This observation is especially true for smaller, so-called quartz-based microbrand manufacturers, usually direct internet and Instagram-marketed, and often Kickstarter-funded (at least at the beginning). By starting with quartz they can expend much less capital than a mechanical-based microbrand, allowing them the chance to ultimately develop the market presence to sell volumes far exceeding the 100-300 watch batches at which they start. This ability to develop their brand also permits them to eventually  get into the more expensive mechanical movement business as well, if they wish (Farer, Dan Henry, Autodromo and others come to mind).

As a mechanical watch lover examining quartz watches, I focus on several categories of interest – movement aesthetics, movement design and innovation, and finally, broader watch design and unique capabilities facilitated by quartz.

There are a number of quartz movement manufacturers that build “quality” movements for broad use, such as the Seiko Group, Casio, Miyota/Citizen, Ronda, ETA. When it comes to innovation though, I don’t think anyone beats Seiko, which began making quartz watches in 1969 with the Quartz-Astron 35SQ

There are a number of pure quartz design elements and innovations in which a mechanical watch owner could be interested. Most obviously, quartz movements can be made much thinner than most but the highest price mechanical movements, providing many interesting design options. The Bulova Precisionist line (owned by Citizen) beats at 262 kHz or 16 beats per second. This feature offers the type of smooth second hand that generally evades quartz watches (in contrast, think of the second hand of Swiss railroad clocks). Basically, a smooth second-hand makes us mechanical watch lovers feel comfortable.

High Accuracy Quartz movements involve various innovations designed to achieve accuracy of 10 seconds per year or better. For example, the Longines Conquest V.H.P. (Very High Precision) has a gear position detection system that allows the watch hands to automatically resync if they are accidentally displaced by a shock or a magnetic field. Another innovation used by Seiko, Breitling, Omega, and others, adds them compensation to the quartz mechanism. A compensating movement typically measures the temperature hundreds of times per day and then uses the information to adjust the frequency of the quartz’s vibrations to make up for any irregularities.

The more recent Ressence Type 2 “e-Crown” is also a mechanical/electronic hybrid with some differences and an additional twist – smartphone app connectivity that provides, among other things, multiple time zone settings from your smartphone.   Instead of following the Seiko and using the mainspring to power the silicone on this unit, the Ressence uses photovoltaic cells under the face. The electronics acts like an “e-crown” interfacing with the modified ETA mechanical movement to set the time and always keep your mechanical movement accurate.

Some modern, innovative designs that would probably never have happened without quartz movements? There are a number of such watches that utilize quartz movements to enable mechanical complications that would be difficult or impossible with a true mechanical movement.

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BlumSafe makes its livelihood from producing wall safes specifically designed for owners of automatic watches, so it might sound like heresy to be advocating the merits of quartz watches or even discussing them, but I felt it was worthy of conversation, with some of the more mainstream manufacturers engaging in soul searching and hybrid innovation, at the same time that microbrand movements are producing so many attractive quartzes watches today.