Horological Meandering

rdenney
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More like the middle 20th, but many made both for decades.

My father was given a Hamilton 782 pocket watch by his college buddies in 1949—he commanded their ROTC company. I own a Hamilton 992 railroad watch (16 size pocket watch) from 1946. But my father in law gave my wife the (tiny) Bulova His Excellency wristwatch given to him by a lady friend in 1950.

It wasn’t the quartz era that killed American watch companies. It was a failure of the high-production business model. As watch prices fell in response to Swiss competition, American companies, instead of lowering production and moving upmarket, allowed themselves to be acquired and dismantled. Some, like Bulova, started using imported movements to support their premium models and survived, and Bulova may be the sole example of that. Some were able to transition to quartz and keep costs down by importing from Japan, like Timex.

We should remember that the first digital-reading wristwatch was made by a subsidiary of Hamilton from before its integration into SSIH, in Pennsylvania. And the first really inexpensive maker of same was Texas Instruments, with its $40 LED watch from 1976. TI, of course, made the first production integrated circuits, in the Semiconductor Building at their Dallas (actually, Richardson) headquarters. That building is still in use at TI. Coincidentally, the headquarters of one of the major brand of inexpensive quartz watches is next door to TI in Dallas: Fossil.

Speaking of Fossil, its retired founder Tom Kartsotis, a fellow Texas Aggie, is also the founder of Shinola. Shinola is certainly an example of successful brand building, whatever we might think of the watches. Im not sure Fossil would exist in your alternate history—Kartsotis founded it on the business model of combining inexpensive Hong Kong production with American design.

The TI watch effectively killed the Pulsar/Hamilton QED, which were too expensive for LED watches. Both might still be in the watch business in the USA, but for Casio, which introduced the Casiotron with superior LCD technology in, as I recall, 1978. Without Casio, American companies, probably new players, would have invented the LCD application and continued competing. The technology was not new to the USA, any more than it was new to Switzerland. It was all about business models.

Without competition from Europe or Japan, the traditional American companies might still not be in existence. TI was the interloper then, just as Apple is today, and neither had any background in making wristwatches. I suspect we’d have all new names. The factories used by Elgin, Hamilton, Bulova, Waltham, Illinois, and so on were built around high production of machines, and mechanical watches were sure to become a low-production boutique item. Cheap mechanical watches were utterly displaced by even cheaper quartz electronics, no matter where they were made, by the very early 80’s.

—Rick

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