Post pics of your watches Part II

njburke wrote: »

Wibbs, what year is the Girard-Perregaux you posted.

That one is from 73 NJ, as is this one, a similar model but with the blue dial and bracelet.



They used to be easy enough to find and you'd have a few on ebay for a couple of hundred quid. These days they rarely seem to come up and are much pricier when they do. That blue one came from France originally, the other linen dial one from Argentina. That particular model was rare enough, maybe one out of six of the examples of that quartz series showing up. The rarest of all being the one with the "Tron" Motorola chip dial(fewer than a dozen known including GP's own museum example). I was looking for years before I finally sourced one of them.

They're an interesting design and story. The first Swiss quartz with a stepping motor and one of a far superior design to even the best of the best today for Seiko and the like. For a start they could drive normal sized hands back in the early 70's(mechanical movements have far more torque). Compare that handset to the Omega's. They're weedy and sticklike by comparison. First to use the 32Khz quartz frequency which 99% of quartz movements have used since. They did away with jewels and used teflon bearings, far more efficient but people like the idea of "jewels", even though they're cheaper, so that died a death. They also designed the movement for ease of maintenance for old style watchmakers who often struggled to deal with the "new" quartz. Unlike many if not most quartz today they and the Omega hit the seconds markers on the money. Then again these were not cheap watches. The Omega Seamaster "Mariner" above was over a half more expensive than a Speedy. The GP was considered good value for a quartz but was just over the price of a Rolex Sub. Then again Rolex were significantly cheaper and more mid range than today.

They were a good earner for GP, as was quartz for the Swiss industry in general. It was the rise and rise in popularity of digitals that killed the Swiss, not quartz itself. There wasn;t a "Quartz Crisis" much more a digital one. Though their marketing today would rarely if ever mention it, the Swiss had innovated and invested heavily in quartz, but missed the digital thing almost completely until it was too late. Then the cheap digitals from Japan and Hong Kong nailed that coffin shut.

It can be hard to understand now since the Swiss mechanical revival and because the Future(tm) and Modernism is far less a thing, but by 1980 it was the equivalent of why would anybody want a steam engine that ran on coal that cost a lot to run and maintain and was slower, when you could have an autonomous Tesla that did 0-60 in OHMYGOD! with flat panels and carplay and fart noises that ran on pennies to the mile? And the Swiss were for the most part were still selling overpriced steam engines, or Teslas that were five years behind the curve. You really couldn't have predicted the future.

After the Swiss conglomerate Beta 21, Longines Ultraquartz(who were a blonde one away from beating Seiko to market and actually had product to sell) and GP with their 350 series that set standards kicked things off Omega were the innovators in design and in a lot of ways the engineering in 70's quartz. They blew pretty much everyone else out of the water on that score. Even in the tiny details. That Omega Seamaster above has a teeny little dot on the movement with the Omega logo to show it's authentic and it's a hologram. In the early 70's.

Yeah the screws are somewhat functional rather than purely decorative so don't line up. If I did tweak them they'd fall out. Still they didn't need to be there from a functional standpoint. The whole screws in the front of the case was big in the 70's and has come back again now the 70's became fashionable again over the last ten years. I can't think of any watches before the very late 60's with visible screws in the front. Screws holding the case from the back were around alright. Though he didn't start the bulky steel with heavy bracelet trend in higher end watches trend Genta singlehandedly kicked that industrial vibe off with the Royal Oak and many brands copied that.