In a quartz watch a battery runs current through a synthetic quartz crystal, which vibrates at 32, 600 beats per second.
It was assumed that accuracy required complex, finely tuned engineering that justified high pricing, but Hayek realized that the quartz watch had erased that advantage.
Lord Harris, who died in 1984, could hardly have imagined how the now-ubiquitous electronic quartz watch would make time-keeping cheap, dependable and above all effortless.
In the early 1980s, the Swiss watch industry faced looming catastrophe as it failed to realize the importance of quartz watches, even though the quartz watch had been invented in Switzerland in 1967.
Seiko introduced the first quartz watch on Christmas Day, 1969, and everyone, the Swiss included, rushed to adopt a technology that was at once more reliable, more accurate and much cheaper to produce.
The Japanese brands of Seiko and Citizen were booking solid sales year after year, why even the film character James Bond has ceased wearing a Swiss timepiece in favor of a Pulsar or Seiko Digital Quartz watch.
FORBES: Swatch Billionaire Nicolas Hayek, Who Saved The Swiss Watch Industry, Dies
Well, if you have ever observed how the second hand of a mechanical watch moves, you know that it appears to run smoothly (in stark contrast to the second hand of a quartz watch, which makes a little jump once a second).
It all began during my first overseas trip to Southeast Asia when I happened to spot that the "in" watch among self-respecting Special Forces operators was a Seiko Quartz Diving Watch.
Of course, it couldn't be just any Seiko Quartz Diving Watch.
Biver along with the late Nicolas Hayek, CEO and board chairman of Swatch, are credited with saving the Swiss watch industry from the quartz movement.
Another formidable competitor is Swatch Group, better known for the cheap plastic watches that helped save Switzerland when the quartz revolution looked as if it would relocate the entire watch industry to the Far East.
The quartz movement does not require battery changes, as a rotor in the watch moves with the motion of your wrist to charge the internal battery.
The Swiss watch brands, still shaking off the near-death stupor of the quartz era, suddenly found this German phoenix uncomfortably hard on their heels.
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