Engineering Time: Inventing the Electronic Watch

British Journal for the History of Science, Vol. 33, pp. 477-497, 2000 Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press 

Authored by: Carlene Stephens and Maggie Dennis

 In the late 1960s teams of engineers working independently in Japan, Switzerland and the United States used newly created electronic components to completely reinvent the wristwatch. The products these groups developed instigated a global revolution in the watch industry and gave everyone, whether they needed it or not, access to the split-second accuracy once available only to scientists and technicians. This radical change in timekeeping technology was in the vanguard of a dramatic shift from a mechanical to an electronic world and raises important issues about technological change for scholars interested in late twentieth-century history. Examining the work of three teams of engineers, this paper offers a comparative approach to understanding how local differences in culture, economy, business structure and access to technological knowledge shaped the design of finished products and their acceptance by users.