Swiss electronic watch development - more info

Mredsnapper

I'm thinking about writing a paper on the quart revolution and the Swiss attempt to develop and bring quartz to market in the 60-70's for a course I'm studying. I can find some general information on the web but can't find anything which discusses for example the Intellectual property and other agreements made between the CEH partners or used defensively against and by Japanese manufacturers. Does anyone here have any links or books titles, groups that they would recommend? Innovations by the Swiss group would also be interesting. Peer reviewed academic journals would be absolutely fantastic but a quick search hasn't thrown up anything and in fact I'm beginning to wonder whether much of this information I'm looking for is out in the open, or if there is sometimes a bit of historical revisionism going on for marketing purposes.
I know that there are a number of experts here (not point at anyone in particular - Wibb's, CB). so no pressure lads:D

Wibbs

I would imagine a large part of your problem MR will be that the Swiss papers and records are primarily written in French(or German), rather than English, so little enough may have filtered through.

EG here's a Longines patent application from 1968(if I read it right) which outlines bits and pieces of what was to become the UltraQuartz.

It seems entirely separate from the CEH group anyway. On that score, when Longines jumped the CEH ship and brought out their own quartz there was talk of lawsuits from the others, but maybe because they had existing patents they were home free?

Here's a page from a Swiss Trade magazine in 1970 again in French outlining the Longines quartz direction.

(the final movement layout is different so this would be a preproduction model. Given the final looked like a preproduction model... )

If you know a fluent French speaking type, buy them a case of beers and ask them to search the web for what you're looking for. I suspect they would have much more luck. I'd also look to American electronics companies as they provided most of the controller chips to the Swiss, so that might be an angle?

It is a very interesting period in horology, one of the most important IMH, yet as you say the history is pretty scant. Maybe revisionism is a little in play as you say, now that quartz is seen as lesser(and mechanicals have much better margins), so maybe Omega for example don't want to think about a time when their flagship Speedmaster was a quarter of the price of their BetaQuartz... PLus a lot of Swiss companies went belly up or nearly so in the 70's and records were misplaced, so the "new" company simply doesn't have the records to fall back on? Not the case with Longines or Omega, or Patek for that matter, as they were the first Swiss company to research quartz, but sold off their research, but did sell quite the number of Beta 21 engined watches and still sell quartz engined watches to this day(mostly in ladies watches).

There are still big gaps. Consider that myself and CB in the last year have found two new makers that used the GP 300 series movements. Makers that were unknown in the current research. And that was from ebay and for little money with it.

Mredsnapper

Thanks Wibb's. Your help is much appreciated.

Wibbs

Another angle you could take might be the different solutions the different companies came up with to get a quartz oscillator to tell the time. EG the Japanese went for the quartz - divider circuit - stepping motor that ticked the seconds off one by one as we're used to today, whereas the Swiss initially went the quartz - divider circuit - tuning fork motor that gave a very smooth seconds sweep. Longines went off piste with quartz - comparison circuit - tuning fork movement where the tuning fork drove the hands, but the electronics compared the 170 hz fork with the 8192 hz quartz and if the fork was running slow or fast it would be sped up or slowed down accordingly. The main benefit of the one tick motor was it was much easier on batteries. It was only when Girard Perregaux went their own way that a Swiss company went the one second tick route. You could compare the quartz rates too. The Swiss initially went 8192 Hz, the Seiko was 16,000 odd Hz. It was GP who went to 32,768 Hz, the frequency that runs the vast majority of quartz watches today. Then the Swiss, especially Omega went mad with speeds for a time, culminating in the Omega Marine Chronometer which was running at 2,359,356 Hz. They chew batteries mind you. 8 months a go I gather. Another area was the production of the quartz oscillators themselves. In those early days they were handmade. :eek: using diamond tools and using natural quartz. The Swiss ones were in the shape of a bar, whereas the Seiko ones were in the shape of a fork, just as they are today. Looking at the development costs, the handmade tech, you can start to see why they were so damned expensive back in the day and how they are a world away from the one jewel plastic quartz movements today. Though the latter are worthy of respect given how accurate and dirt cheap they became.

Mredsnapper

Thanks Wibb's - you are a star. Unfortunately I'm having a hard time finding the sort of hard facts 'backed up by the literature' as my tutor would say. I think there is probably an opening for an interesting study in this area though by someone with insider knowledge. Hard to believe believe that it hasn't already been done but I guess things were different 40-50 years ago and as you say lots of information may have just been misplaced or undocumented.

Wibbs

I'll have a dig around and see what stuff I have of the period that might help you. They'll be mostly trade mag pieces and original manuals kinda thing. Now there are books on the era, but even those while mines of info are lacking in a lot of areas. It seems to have been a very muddy time, though I personally don't buy that, I do think it's quite a bit of selective memory going on above and beyond the actual losses of documentation. Perfect example; Seiko have their history of the time all worked out and catalogued, yet makers like Omega don't? I don't buy it at all. Then again today, the majority of Seiko's sales are in quartz so they have no issue with the association, but with a crowd like Omega their bulk of margins and bulk of advertising is coming from "Olde worlde Swiss mechanical". Doubly dubious when we consider that Omega at one time were the real innovators pushing the envelope in the new tech and in the high end luxury market with it.

CarltonBrowne

The principle existing books are by Pieter Doensen or Lucien Trueb.
http://doensen.home.xs4all.nl/
http://forum.tz-uk.com/showthread.php?276531-Book-by-Lucien-F-Trueb-Electrfying-the-Wristwatch

I have tried to contact Doensen about one previously undocumented GP Quartz 352 variant and never got a response so good luck with that (although I suppose there may be various legitimate reasons for this - although I'm pretty sure that I deliberately wrote the email from my work email and I work for a relatively well known international organisation).

In any case I think you will have two principal challenges

1. I have several friends who are academics so any paper isn't really going to have much currency unless you can find original sources which will probably be in French but also may be in German (or even Japanese - eek). I don't know what you're linguistic ability is but I imagine you'll need some.
2. The Swiss are notoriously commercially secretive and clearly any normal EU-type FOI legislation will not apply. I don't know if you can get a reader's ticket for their equivalent of either the National Library or Companies House and honestly have no idea what that would yield. With the recent exchange rate changes (the CHF already being off the scale) it's unlikely to be a cheap trip!

So I think you're going to need quite a bit of luck. As a matter of interest I've been meaning to do a post on the Girard Perregaux company forum on the watch that I have but made by/for Revue (MSR) and i'll keep you informed on what they say. From one angle they might engage as they have a lot to be proud of with the 35X series movement however the counter argument is that it's only a brief period in their history and their current business is about selling watches with manufacture movements at prices with several more zeroes at the end of the price that I paid. I'm hoping that the fact that they maintain a museum indicates a broader view.

Wibbs

Sadly CB, I suspect that if your watch was a mechanical from "a brief period in their history" they might be more forthcoming. Still we live in hope and I do keep my eye on their forum and your thread... I may throw a Consul into the mix if you get any headway.

Over the years I have found Longines to be much more interested in items like their non mechanical stuff such as Ultronics(even though it was a bought in movement) and they will, along with the original seller and year of manufacture even email you original ads for the watch you have(and do so gratis, unlike Omega). I may try them again with another "ultra" I'm hopping from foot to foot in anticipation for. It lives Igor, It lives!! *cybernetic lightning crackles* Though a contact did tell me that they had remarkably little in their records on such models in that period, which actually surprised them. EG with the Ultraquartz the only spare part they listed at the time was the entire movement, whereas every mechanical had all the different bits listed(the Beta 21 was similar I gather).

Now with a Swiss company that went under during the Quartz crisis only to be reborn as a shelf company with an entirely new setup I could understand this, but with folks like Omega, Longines and the like, who have very solid records going way back? It makes little sense. There does seem to be a blind spot in this period.

Which is even more weird considering the mad amount of funds they all threw at this new tech. GP threw millions(at the time) at their quartz efforts and had to bring in a big name like Jaeger leCoultre to help fund it. Longines threw a fair few quid at the Beta 21 project and then dropped it and went ther own way throwing more money at it(and as my patent example above shows, they were throwing money at their internal research even while they were in the Beta 21 group). Weirder, was Patek, who in the very early days were leading the Swiss in quartz dev, yet they for some reason abandoned it early on and passed/sold on their research.

IMH I reckon it was one of, if not the biggest financial investments in the history of the Swiss watch industry and one of the biggest investments in technological research in that industry since the mid 19th century, yet it is one of the least well documented periods in the same industry. It makes little sense. When that kinda money is floating about, you can be damned sure they had very clear records.

Further on the language angle, even native French folks on French watch sites can find little more than English speakers. T'is very odd.

Maybe, just maybe, because it was such new tech and an obvious gamechanger and they were afeared of corporate espionage, there was a culture of secrecy and need to know at the time, that has led to the dearth of information today? That still makes no sense as the Beta project was shared among 22 manufacturers.

*wibbs, still scratching his head*

Wibbs

Just a bit of a follow up, here's a PDF containing a lot of info on the early days of battery watches and a page with another breakdown of the Swiss quartz timeline.

Mredsnapper

Wibbs wrote: »

Just a bit of a follow up, here's a PDF containing a lot of info on the early days of battery watches and a page with another breakdown of the Swiss quartz timeline.

Thanks Wibbs. This is really interesting stuff.

CarltonBrowne

I've (finally) popped up my question on the Girard Perregaux forum. Let's see what they do with it.