The jungle stockade at night. The gates are securely barred; or so you think. The sentries are on duty. But it?s dark. Properly dark. The sort of velvet dark you can touch out and feel. And then you hear a noise – a branch snapping" What?s out there" You suddenly hear another branch give way. Then, as you look out into the night, you see them – hundreds of little red eyes staring back at you.
This, ladies and gentlemen, was the Swiss watch industry in the early 1970s. The little red eyes belonged to the advancing ranks of quartz LED watches. Along with their analogue comrades and later LCD reinforcements they wiped the floor with the traditional watch industry. So far, so much for the standard narrative. But what?s less well-known is how rapidly the Swiss redeployed to not just meet the onslaught but develop their own technology to push it back.
In fact, the Swiss started the war. Even in May 1965 they were working on developing analogue quartz movements, the first of which, the Beta 1 would come off the bench in mid-1967. By contrast, it took Seiko until the end of 1969 to launch their Astron. Girard-Perregaux was the first maker to produce a commercial analogue quartz movement with the GP350 and the firm followed this up in 1976 with its first LED digital, later nicknamed the Casquette. With all things 1970s back in fashion, GP have decided to relaunch the Casquette – now a collectable watch in its own right.
There were two big proble...