Watches and movements

The electronic watch industry came into being in the 1950s. It owes its importance in watchmaking these days to the contribution made by other industries and to the endeavours of a few ingenious researchers who came up with new solutions to turn the watch into the object we all know today. The starting point was the availability of electrochemical batteries that were small enough for a watch and had approximately 1,000 times more energy than a barrel. If a barrel can keep a balance going for one day, it must logically be possible for these small batteries to power a resonator similar to, or even perhaps weighing slightly more than, the balance, for one year. It also calls for a high-performance electromechanical transducer which transfers the energy from the battery to the resonator and a contact which has to work at least one billion times without fail. This was the principle behind the first watches rolled out between 1954 and 1965. By this time, the transistor was already in existence but was far too expensive and inefficient for watchmaking purposes. Indeed, researchers were already considering replacing this mechanical contact with a more highly reliable electronic system.