So 60 years ago batteries finally developed to the point they were reliable & powerful enough.
Then in 1960 we got the Bulova Accutron, the first electric tuning-fork watch.
Nine years thereafter, Christmas Day 1969, the Seiko Astron 35SQ arrived - the first electrically-excited quartz crystal watch. (The first quartz clock had been built in Bell Laboratories in 1927)
Radio wave adjusted (“atomic”) clocks appeared around 1983 - Heathkit offered them for true nerdy 🤓 home enthusiasts, but the first radio watch was the Junghans MEGA-1 in 1990. They received radio signals from government-run, time-keeping facilities in various countries.
The first solar GPS watch, which connected to and receives time signals from the orbiting network of Global Positioning Satellites, was Seiko’s new Astron, which appeared as recently as 2012.