The Modern Collector's Vintage Choice
For years, quartz watches have been quietly misunderstood.
Mention vintage watch collecting and conversation tends naturally towards mechanical movements: escapements, balance wheels, automatic winding and the tiny machines that somehow continue running half a century after they were made.
Quartz is often treated rather differently.
Practical. Accurate. Convenient.
Perhaps even disposable.
Yet that overlooks a much more interesting history.
Quartz wasn't born cheap.
It was born extraordinary.
When Accuracy Was Luxury
On Christmas Day 1969, Seiko introduced the Quartz Astron 35SQ, the world's first commercially available quartz wristwatch.
This was not an inexpensive alternative to a mechanical watch.
The Astron was housed in 18-carat gold, produced in tiny numbers and carried a price of 450,000 yen — around the price of a small car in Japan at the time.
Its accuracy was equally startling.
Where a good mechanical wristwatch measured its performance in seconds per day, quartz offered the possibility of measuring deviation in seconds per month.
The technology wasn't trying to make watchmaking cheaper.
It was trying to make timekeeping better.
Then Quartz Won
And perhaps that's where its image problem eventually began.
Quartz technology developed rapidly through the 1970s.
Circuits improved. Manufacturing became more efficient. Prices fell. Accuracy that had once seemed extraordinary became available to almost everybody.
By the 1980s, quartz watches were everywhere.
That transformation profoundly changed the global watch industry and placed enormous pressure on traditional Swiss mechanical watchmaking.
But something else happened along the way.
As quartz became commonplace, people stopped noticing how remarkable it was.
Its greatest achievement became its greatest problem.
It worked too well.
Not All Quartz Was Created Equal
The explosion in inexpensive quartz watches created another misconception: that all quartz movements are essentially the same.
They aren't.
Just as mechanical movements range from very simple mass-produced calibres to extraordinarily sophisticated pieces of engineering, quartz developed its own hierarchy.
Manufacturers including Seiko continued exploring what high-quality quartz could become.
Better temperature compensation, more sophisticated integrated circuits, improved motors and serviceable movement architecture pushed quartz far beyond the simple battery-and-coil mechanism many people imagine.
For the vintage collector, this is where things become particularly interesting.
Quartz Grows Up
Grand Seiko's 9F, introduced in 1993, is perhaps one of the clearest examples.
Rather than treating quartz as a way of simplifying watchmaking, Seiko approached it almost as though it were building a fine mechanical calibre.
The movement was designed for longevity and serviceability.
A high-torque motor allowed it to move substantial hands. A backlash auto-adjust mechanism reduced the tiny shudder that can occur when a quartz seconds hand stops. The gear train was protected and lubricants were designed for long-term stability.
Even the quartz crystals themselves were individually selected and aged before use.
Standard 9F movements achieve accuracy around ±10 seconds per year.
Not per day.
Not per month.
Per year.
That isn't cheap watchmaking.
It's obsessive watchmaking using electricity.
The Vintage Opportunity
And this is where quartz starts to make enormous sense today.
Many interesting quartz watches from the 1970s, '80s and '90s still sit outside the collecting frenzy surrounding their mechanical contemporaries.
That means a collector can sometimes find remarkable movements, strong period design and genuine historical importance for considerably less money.
There are practical advantages too.
A good vintage quartz watch can be picked up after several days in the box and still be showing the correct time. There is no winding ritual and very little positional variation.
For somebody who rotates several watches, that's rather useful.
None of which makes quartz inherently better than mechanical.
It simply makes it different.
The Watchmaker's View
Quartz also looks rather different from this side of the bench.
A good quartz movement is not necessarily a disposable object.
Many higher-quality vintage calibres were designed to be inspected, diagnosed and serviced. Circuits can be tested. Coils checked. Mechanical components cleaned and lubricated. Worn components can sometimes be replaced.
Of course, parts availability becomes increasingly important as watches age, just as it does with mechanical movements.
But opening a well-made vintage quartz movement can reveal an engineering philosophy every bit as deliberate as the mechanical watches sitting beside it.
The problems are different.
The thinking isn't absent.
Mechanical Versus Quartz
Collectors sometimes feel they have to choose a side.
We don't think they do.
A mechanical movement is fascinating because of the extraordinary way it measures time using stored energy, gears, springs and an escapement.
A quartz movement is fascinating because engineers found an entirely different solution to exactly the same problem.
And occasionally the two histories meet.
Spring Drive — another story sitting here in the Magazine — exists precisely because Seiko's mechanical and quartz knowledge eventually came together.
Perhaps that's the more interesting way to look at watchmaking.
Not as competing tribes, but as different answers to the same question:
How accurately can we measure the passing of time?
Quartz Reconsidered
The irony is that quartz became ordinary because it was so successful.
Technology that once represented the absolute cutting edge of wristwatch development eventually became inexpensive enough to put almost anywhere.
But the cheap quartz watches that followed shouldn't make us forget where the story began — or where serious quartz watchmaking eventually went.
Look beyond the battery and there is history, innovation, engineering and, increasingly, collectability.
Mechanical watches don't need defending from quartz.
And good quartz watches don't need apologising for either.
Perhaps it's simply time we looked at them again.