he history of watchmaking, our particular field of study, has always considered the so-called “quartz crisis” in terms of its crushing inevitability. The images used to describe it - a “tidal wave”, a “tsunami” – speak volumes, conjuring up an unstoppable, almost biblical force that brought the development of mechanical watchmaking to a standstill for almost 20 years. What better subject for this first venture into uchronistic terrain: “What if Switzerland had become the industrial motor for quartz in the 1960s?”

We questioned various industry players – analysts, marketing managers, entrepreneurs and historians –, taking care to maintain a balance between a now older generation who experienced the period in question first-hand and a younger generation who were brought up on the fatalist discourse that we intend to deconstruct.

The subject raises numerous questions: if Switzerland had successfully pursued quartz, could the two technologies, quartz and mechanical, have co-existed? Or would one have devoured the other? Would management have known how to sell quartz? Was marketing prepared? Would Asian manufacturers have produced quartz movements in the same volumes? Would new players have emerged? How would suppliers have reacted? Where would export markets have been? Would young and old have embraced Swiss-Made quartz in the same way?

What was, and what might have been

A lot of questions, as many answers, sometimes different, often divergent. No matter. The benefit of uchronia is that there is no right or wrong analysis, given that the situation under review never existed.

All those we questioned insisted on one thing, and that is the order in which initial events took place, before the floodgates opened. An exercise best left to historians. “On December 19, 1967, the Centre Électronique Horloger (CEH) presented Bêta 1 and Bêta 12, the first prototype microelectronic watches with an integrated circuit, a quartz resonator oscillating at 8,192 Hz and a dial swept by hands. They were commercialised in 1970. The CEH was therefore two years ahead of Seiko which launched the Astron Cal. 35 SQ quartz wristwatch on December 25, 1969,” says Dominique Fléchon.

These are the facts. Where history ends and reflection begins. What would have happened if the Swiss had jumped on the CEH’s invention and started to produce quartz watches on an industrial scale? Another historian, Pierre-Yves Donzé, kicks off the debate: “Impossible. Switzerland’s watch industry was made up of a multitude of independent and rival companies which would never have united behind a single objective such as the industrialisation of quartz. It would have taken different players, different structures. Companies would have had to merge.”

Jérôme Biard, boss of Roventa-Henex, echoes this view: “Swiss quartz could only have existed on an industrial scale through collaboration with research organisations such as EPFZ [Federal Institute of Technology Zurich]. This wouldn’t pose a problem today but back then, we didn’t have the same reflexes.”

“We came within a whisker”

Yet efforts were being made in R&D - something LIP, in the person of current managing director, Pierre-Alain Bérard, knows better than anyone: “In the 1960s, Fred Lip spent a fortune to develop hybrid movements. These were fitted with a traditional escapement and were powered by electrical energy [read our article on the subject]. He explored this route relentlessly before giving up and coming back to traditional mechanical movements, just when quartz was beginning to emerge. We came within a whisker. LIP in the 1960s and 1970s was a force to be reckoned with and could easily have been a major industrial player for quartz.”

LIP, of course, is French. What about in Switzerland? Jean-Claude Biver has no trouble imagining what might have been: “If we’d managed to catch the quartz wave in time then yes, we would have had the capacity for industrialisation. Quartz isn’t watchmaking, it’s assembly. If you can produce a mechanical movement, you can assemble a quartz movement.”

Dominique Fléchon is not so sure: “You have to consider the mentality at that time. No, I don’t see the workforce back then switching to quartz at the drop of a hat. These were companies led by successive generations of the same family, rooted in tradition. They were using gentian! Even the people who taught watchmaking had been trained to pass on the same methods. It’s true that quartz isn’t watchmaking but that’s the whole point. It’s a different environment, a different approach. There would have been an intellectual, structural, almost ideological blockage, from centuries of tradition.”

Was marketing ready?

Entrepreneur Vincent Perriard has a long track record in the contemporary watch industry. He goes a step further: “The industry wasn’t mature enough, for sure, but that’s not all. It’s not enough to invent a product; you have to sell it, too. This would have meant inventing quartz and, at the same time, the means to market it. Omega, Audemars Piguet and Rolex were already marketing their products to a degree but watch marketing didn’t begin in earnest until the 1980s with Swatch, then in the 1990s with TAG Heuer.”

Guillaume Laidet, another serial entrepreneur at the helm of Nivada and Vulcain, quotes Rolex CEO Jean-Frédéric Dufour: “If we don’t sell dreams, we risk losing the mechanical watch.” His conclusion: “even the most disruptive technology isn’t enough to sell a watch.”

These various considerations seem to suggest that, under certain conditions, quartz could have developed on an industrial scale in Switzerland as of the 1960s, but what of the end customer? Knowing how to manufacture and market a product is only part of the equation. Individuals make purchases for irrational reasons, too. Even so, Pierre-Alain Bérard is adamant: “Swiss quartz would have appealed to everyone, young and old. It was new, simple, practical, reliable, easy to make and inexpensive.”

The enemy within

In this light, a hypothetical Swiss quartz watch was destined for success. But would this success have been to the detriment of mechanical? Opinion is divided. “Let’s just say that if the Swiss had been able to industrialise and sell mechanical and quartz side by side, the transition from the former to the latter would have been smoother,” says Guillaume Laidet, diplomatically.

Pierre-Alain Bérard has a more radical and certainly thought-provoking hypothesis: “A Swiss quartz watch would have caused infinitely more damage to Swiss mechanical watches than quartz watches from Asia ever did. I don’t think Patek Philippe, Rolex or Jaeger-LeCoultre would be what they are today. Why not? Because the most powerful enemy is the enemy within.”

Bérard pulls at the thread some more: “Watchmaking, like any industry, is built on capital and bank financing. Had Switzerland successfully developed industrial-scale quartz, banks would have seen the potential and invested massively in quartz, rather than finance companies producing mechanical watches. A lot of traditional makers would probably have shut down. Don’t forget that Jaeger-LeCoultre came within an inch of bankruptcy in the 1970s.”

As Pierre-Yves Donzé explains, “supposing the Swiss did come up with the idea for quartz and supposing we had had the means to industrialise production and market the whole thing, there was nothing to prevent the United States and Asia from joining the fray. They already had the capacity.”

A hypothetical European consortium

This takes us in a new direction: what if Europe had had that capacity, too? “Europe had the likes of Philips, Matra, Thomson and BBC, now ABB, the equivalent of Texas Instruments, Westinghouse or Fairchild in the US,” Donzé continues “But they were big industries. Tiny quartz, which they would have had to produce by the tens of millions, wasn’t their field.”

Dominique Fléchon is of the same view: “No-one had control over the entire quartz production chain. It would have taken a European consortium. France and Germany had significant industrial capacities but it’s not in Switzerland’s nature to join forces with other countries.” Jérôme Biard agrees: “You can’t compete in every category. Plus quartz is an easy technology to copy.”Sooner or later,“Jean-Claude Biver suggests,”Asia would have taken volume but Switzerland could have held on to value.“What these volumes and value might have been hinges on a third unknown: what would a Swiss-Made quartz watch have looked like in the late 1960s? Pierre-Alain Bérard has his idea:”It would have been thinner, more extravagant. Designers love disruptive technologies." Which is precisely what happened 20 years later with the launch of the Swatch.

Swatch, what else

And there you have it. What began here as a hypothesis – that Switzerland embrace quartz technology – ended as reality when on March 1, 1983, Nicolas Hayek unveiled the now famous, inexpensive (CHF 50), plastic fashion watch. This is also where our uchronistic musings reach their limit: no-one can imagine an alternate history to the one Nicolas Hayek wrote. “No-one else could have done what he did,” insists Dominique Fléchon. “He wasn’t a watchmaker so he didn’t think inside that particular box. He was a businessman whose different nationalities gave him a broad cultural perspective. He saw a good business opportunity and amassed the industrial competencies he needed to bring it to fruition, bringing under one roof capacities that were previously spread across different locations. A pure visionary.”

As a historian, Pierre-Yves Donzé approves the hypothesis but is sure of one thing: if Switzerland had been making quartz watches as of the 1960s, the Swatch of the 1980s as we knew it may never have existed. Why? “Because the Swatch was the response to a crisis. A disruptive innovation. Hence if Swiss quartz had existed from the 1960s, by definition the Swatch revolution could never have happened.” You can imagine what might have been but you cannot rewrite history.