Why electric watches were doomed from the very beginning

Borna Bošnjak

Maybe you’re just getting into watches, or maybe you’re already a seasoned enthusiast. Whatever the case is, I’d bet that in your daily watch browings, you usually come across two types of watches – quartz and mechanical. And if you fall into the enthusiast category, you’re already likely familiar with how those two came about, especially when it comes to quartz and the well-known story of the quartz crisis. But of course, just like with the advent of any new technological advancement, the transition wasn’t as smooth as going from mechanical to quartz overnight – and it’s this transitional period that is such an interesting, and in my opinion underappreciated, watchmaking topic. I’m talking specifically about electric watches. And no, I’m not talking about digital watches with integrated circuits here – this is all about watches with some form of mechanical time display, but powered by a battery and regulated by either a tuning fork or balance wheel. No quartz regulator to speak of here!

What is an electric watch?

I think this is the best place to start, and we should first clear up some nomenclature. I’m talking about the difference between electric watches and electronic watches. While these terms are often used interchangeably in daily life, there is a significant difference. An electric device will merely use electricity to be powered – think a lightbulb or an electric motor, whereas an electronic devices uses that energy to transmit information and perform logic, usually by way of transistors. We’ll look at both types in this article.

The first, and perhaps most true to its description, would be the moving coil movements such as the Hamilton Electric 500 from 1954. These feature a balance wheel that closely resembles that of a mechanical watch, but with the key difference being its integrated coil. The balance gets an impulse only in one direction, necessitating the use of a balance spring to receive the energy for the reverse swing. As the hairspring swings the balance back, it gets an impulse as its coil passes the permanent magnets in the bridges, which closes the contacts and gives the balance wheel a push from the electromagnetic force.

Staying in the realm of contact-controlled movements, there is also the balance-regulated, fixed-coil type. As their name suggests, the coil moves to a fixed position in the movement, and the balance is instead fitted with a refined iron segment. As the balance swings and the iron swings towards the coil, it interacts with the mechanical contact and closes the circuit, magnetising the coil’s core and giving the balance an impulse. Just like with the moving coil movements, the balance spring swings the wheel back in the opposite direction.

These fixed-coil movements are also notable as being the most primitive form of an electronic movement (though the Accutron often gets the plaudits of being the first), with some manufacturers introducing diodes to reduce sparking when the iron makes contact. Lip was the first brand to do this in 1957, though others would adopt the semiconductor component as well, such as the above Landeron-powered Wittnauer. While the movement may have had Landeron’s name on it, they originated as ESA movements – widely considered to be among the most important makers of electric movements at the time.

Staying on the topic of electric/electronic movement with balance wheels, the third extant type is the so-called “balance-transistor” movement. This is the best and latest development of an electronic movement with a balance wheel, as the addition of a transistor meant that the contact switch could be eliminated, making it more reliable as there was now no physical contact that could get worn out or spark. Here, the current from the battery is monitored by a transistor-equipped circuit, which generates impulses that drive two coils in the baseplate that interact with the magnets affixed to the balance. Movements like the Bifora B11 and Timex M87 had coils on the balance and magnets affixed to the baseplate – you can think about these as moving-coil, transistor-regulated movements (as opposed to the aforementioned contact-controlled).

And if you’ve been waiting for me to finally mention the Bulova Accutron – well, that time is now. The Accutron was the first-ever watch that introduced a transistor, doing so in 1960 (seven years before the ESA Dynotron). For most tuning fork movements, the principle of operation is the same. They’re equipped with a solenoid-driven tuning fork vibrating hundreds of times per second, which gives them their characteristic hum. A pawl attached to the tuning fork translates its vibration to an indexing mechanism with a many-toothed wheel at the centre of the movement that would go on to translate it to the gear train, including the smoothly sweeping seconds hand.

Apart from Bulova, ESA is known for its (relatively) high-quality 916X range of tuning fork movements (part of Omega’s F300 line), while Omega had the Megasonic calibre that beat at 720Hz – double the Bulova’s and ESA’s beat rates. The Megasonic was actually developed by man behind the Accutron, Max Hetzel, and featured a micromotor on the movement’s tuning fork, magnetically coupling with toothless gears in the movement.

I’ll only make brief mention of quartz-controlled electronic watches, which used either a tuning fork or balance wheel, where the quartz-containing circuit would replace the basic electric components and control the impulses sent to the balance wheel or tuning fork frequency. These are incredibly rare, few companies made them (Timex, Bulova, and Citizen, to name a few) starting in the early 1970s, but quickly disappeared similarly to other electric movements, just with even less time to develop.

Concurrent development

Okay, so we’ve gone through the various types of electric movements – but why did they exist in the first place? On paper, the idea was similar to the one that kick-started the development of quartz watches. The idea was that electric watches would never need to be wound, leading to improved long-term reliability. In the case of the tuning fork, you also had the added benefit of oscillation at a much higher frequency than mechanical watches, and doing so with very little friction.

Hamilton is the pioneer in this space, beginning development as early as the mid-1940s, but taking nearly two decades to produce the 500 Electric. It would’ve been a good idea to spend a bit more time developing it however, as the 1957 launch was rushed to be the first to market – and the idea proved to be popular. There’s probably a finer turn of phrase I could use here, but describing it as a bit of a dog would be accurate. The biggest issue was with the contact coils that would wear out quickly and were difficult to replace, and though Hamilton would address these issues in 1961 with the 505, the 500 cemented itself in the eyes of the public as an unreliable movement.

Starting as early, if not even earlier than Hamilton, were Lip and Elgin. The former developed electric clocks before the advent of WWI, and would display working prototypes of its electric wristwatches on the 19th of March 1952 alongside Elgin. Having said that, these were not the kinds of prototypes you’d see at, say, Watches and Wonders. The Lip-developed batteries hand a tendency to explode, and it would take until 1958 for the brand to launch its R27 movement which looked to resolve the sparking issue by including diodes.

If Fred Lip’s biography is to be believed, he sought to drive interest in the R27 by gifting one to Charles de Gaulle. Given the finnicky nature of the technology, however, he employed de Gaulle’s wife to secretly replace the watch every week, with the other undergoing servicing and regulation, only to be returned to the French president the following week, in tip-top shape.

The turn of the decade would see Bulova enter the electronic race with the Accutron 214 movement introduced in November 1960. The tuning fork construction would prove to be more reliable than its balance wheel-equipped predecessors, and is actually the only type of electronic movement that survives until today, as Bulova chose to continue focusing on the tuning fork even once quartz became widely embraced as the superior technology.

Researching this article, I realised that there were far more manufacturers making electric/electronic movements than I ever thought existed, with the full list including Citizen, ESA, Landeron, Luch, Porta, Seiko, and Timex. Now, the more popular among these are pretty hard to miss, the most well-recognised probably being ESA as its movements were used in a myriad of Swiss watches, and included both balance wheel and tuning fork electric watches, as well as chronograph developments of its 9162 movement. The ESA 9210 was the only tuning fork chronograph ever produced, and not made in large quantities, used by the Omega Speedsonic, Baume & Mercier Tronosonic, and Certina Chronolympic, to name a few.

Ended, rather than failed

While I’ve already hypothesised that electric watches might’ve taken off had the quartz crisis never happened, that’s honestly an unrealistic expectation. Electric watches naturally evolved into quartz watches, and those quartz-controlled electronic movements are all the proof we need. Whether it’s those pesky switch contacts that would give notoriety to the Hamilton 500, or the unique micromotors of the Omega Megasonic, it’s perhaps unfair to say that the electric movement failed. Had electric movements never existed, we’d likely never get quartz, either.

As a result, electric watches continue to be quite rare, and the space-age designs of the 1960s and ’70s are truly quite unique, and not as expensive as you may think. The only real issue of owning an electric watch these days is finding someone to service it. They’re accurate enough when they work, but finding someone to fix one when it goes wrong is perhaps best when you’ve already got a few reliable quartz pieces in your drawer.

I wanted to end this article by shouting out a couple of pages that have helped fill the major gaps in my knowledge about electric and electronic watches, as they’ll be able to go into a crazy amount of detail about anything you’ve read here. So if you want to continue learning, head to Electric Watches, La Clinique Horlogère, and Unwind in Time for a selection of tasty vintage pieces.

Feature image courtesy of Unwind in Time and L’Atelier du Temps.