Ultimately, in the mid-1970s, quartz watches became an inexpensive novelty that attracted millions of buyers. Bauer will describe the rapid development of quartz timepieces in Japan, at a time when the Swiss were just dipping their toes into quartz technology. The lecture will also include an overview of how successful Swiss watchmaking was prior to the crisis, and how important it was to the Swiss economy. In the early and mid-20th century, the Swiss watchmaking industry was booming - until the quartz crisis happened in the 1970s and shook it to its core.Īt the September 2022 lecture of the Horological Society of New York (HSNY), watch and jewelry writer Hyla Ames Bauer will discuss the quartz crisis, beginning with what a quartz watch is, and why it's called a quartz watch and not a battery watch (or some other name). Note from the lecturer: Wear a Swatch if you have one! Highly literate, highly skilled and an integral part of wide-ranging & highly-connected networks, early modern clock and watch makers played an active role in disseminating, validating and discrediting ideas and practices. Clock and watch makers of the past were after all inextricably part of the wider context of experiment, knowledge formation and exchange which characterised the early modern period. Comparing dials with contemporary texts and diagrams enables us to identify the influences that led to these changes. Multiple forms of lunar calendar and astronomical symbols, for example, were highly significant to both makers and users during the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but eventually either disappeared entirely or survived on only rare examples.
It is, therefore, the discarded elements that did not secure a place on the uniform design that are the most interesting. This 220-year journey of development was a fascinating one in which different attributes of dial design were introduced to meet a particular user demand, such as the touch-pins which were added to help partially-sighted users and which were then discarded once alternative aids became available.
Jane Desborough, Keeper of Science Collections at the Science Museum in London, will chart the significant changes that dials underwent in the period from 1550 to 1770, highlighting the many factors that eventually led to a more-or-less uniform design being adopted by 1770. At the October 2022 lecture of the Horological Society of New York, Dr. Doors open at 6PM ET, lecture and Zoom livestream to begin at 7PM ET.Įarly modern clock and watch dials mirrored changes in the wider intellectual and cultural context of which they were inextricably a part. Seating is limited and available via RSVP on a first-come-first-serve basis. * HSNY's October 2022 lecture will take place in person in the General Society’s Assembly Room, located on the first floor of the building due to renovations in the General Society Library.
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