How Japan Killed American Watchmaking in 10 Years: The Quartz Crisis

When people hear the words "quartz crisis," they picture Switzerland. They imagine Alpine villages emptying, centuries of tradition collapsing under the weight of a battery-powered intruder from the East. That picture is wrong. Switzerland survived. The watch industry that actually died was the American one. By Christmas Day 1969, when the first quartz wristwatch goes on sale in a Tokyo department store, the largest American watch company has already declared bankruptcy. The second largest has been dead for over a decade. The third has just packed up and moved to Switzerland. Japan does not wound American watchmaking. It annihilates it. And the killing takes less than ten years.