History of the First Quartz Wristwatch

By Dr. Armin H. Frei, 2009 

Introduction

In July 1967, more than 40 years ago, the world's first quartz wristwatch (QWW) had been created, assembled and successfully tested for proper operation by a group of researchers at the Centre Electronique Horloger (CEH) in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. The watch baptized Beta 1 with the identification number CEH-1020 was fully meeting the regulatory requirements concerning men's wristwatches, as postulated by the established Observatory of Neuchâtel and its famous yearly "Concours Chronométrique".

In view of the fact that the true history of the invention of the quartz wristwatch has been extensively neglected and/or mistreated in the past, causing misunderstandings and confusion, I have investigated on "who contributed what, at what time and what was the relevance of this contribution", restricted to the event of the creation of the world's first quartz wristwatch.

Centre Electronique Horloger (CEH), Neuchâtel

The foundation of the Centre Electronique Horloger in 1962 was a consequence of the growing threat due to the appearance of certain kinds of wristwatches in the late 50ies which were powered by small batteries rather than by the usual springs. Such watches had been announced by Lip (France), by Hamilton (USA) and by Ebauches SA (Switzerland). The introduction of Max Hetzel's Accutron, the famous tuning fork watch (picture) in 1960, accelerated this process remarkably. Hetzel was a Swiss engineer, who started his investigations with Bulova in Bienne, Switzerland, and later on was transferred to U.S. to direct the production of the Accutron watch.

The fear to lose leading positions on the international market assembled the Swiss watchmakers under the leadership of Ebauches SA and the Swiss Horological Federation (FH) to join in a common joint stock company called CEH. The goal was simply to come up with an improved solution which was superior in at least one count of what was available on the market. This to strengthen the Swiss position in possible license negotiations, a rather poor vision indeed. Luckily, they found Roger Wellinger, a U.S. bound Swiss engineer, teacher and researcher, for the challenging job to create a new research laboratory in a field which was not common at all in Switzerland. Wellinger had courage, enthusiasm and farsightedness.

Goal and Strategy

The goal set up by the Swiss watch industry was to develop electronic wristwatches with at least one advantage compared to existing products (e.g. Accutron). A fairly modest goal indeed, reflecting business and legal aspects predominantly. – The strategy to reach that goal had been set up by Roger Wellinger and consisted mainly of three elements: i) recruiting and hiring Swiss scientists, who had spent a certain time in the U.S. and were willing to come back with the intention of importing technical and scientific know-how from the U.S. to Switzerland, especially in the area of semiconductors and circuits. ii) Investigating all kinds of possible subsystems and later on developing new kinds of solutions similar to the morphology developed by Prof. Fritz Zwicky, Caltec. Especially in the area of acoustic resonators, frequency dividers and displays there had been a great number of various investigations resulting in a fairly complete catalogue of possibilities. iii) Building up semiconductor expertise in Switzerland. – However, none of the projects until 1965 incorporated a quartz wristwatch.¹ There was neither a strategy nor a project addressing a high frequency, say 10 kHz quartz wristwatch, simply because such an enterprise was considered impossible by experts and industry leaders due to the high frequencies involved and for other reasons.² Even worse, in 1966, when the quartz wristwatch project was already established, the president of the governing board informed the two initiators of the quartz wristwatch project that the Swiss watch industry was not interested in this new kind of a quartz wristwatch!

Since the very beginning Roger Wellinger recognized the importance of an own semiconductor laboratory. That was the only way to become independent from foreign suppliers and at the same time allowed to investigate into dedicated research. Kurt Hübner and his group started quickly and very successfully developing integrated circuits (IC) capability and competence in bipolar transistor technology and double diffused, high impedance resistors. With this, it was already possible in 1965 to produce the first complex IC's. CEH was certainly in a favored position as compared to Seiko, which equipped their first quartz wristwatch caliber 1967 with discrete transistors, resistors and capacitors, about 200 of them. – Unfortunately, since Spring 1965, the CEH and its management had been confronted for more than a full year with the CISSA project. CISSA stands for "Communauté Industrielle Suisse SA", a consortium of a number of Swiss firms together with Philips, Netherlands. The purpose of this was an unfriendly buy-out of CEH's successful semiconductor department. It was above all Roger Wellinger who fought against this fatal attempts and provided for continuous fruitful cooperation between the semiconductor department and the rest of the laboratory.

New Strategy: Montre-Bracelet à Quartz

Status

The strategy and plan in the field of electronic wristwatches for the year 1965⁶ concentrated on two topics: i) the Alpha caliber, a wristwatch incorporating a figure 8-shaped metallic resonator with reduced gravitational disturbances by Heinz Waldburger, otherwise similar to the Accutron, and ii) the Beta project incorporating a metallic tuning fork like the Accutron, but newly with a small chain of frequency dividers to drive a separate motor. The Beta project at that time was the only one incorporating two electromechanical transducers, the second transducer being an electromagnetic or a piezoelectric vibrating motor. The Beta project by Max Forrer was the most elaborate project concerning time and resources and further was the only one which never reached the status of a working caliber. – Max Forrer's Beta project must not be confused with the later Beta 1, Beta 2 calibers under the direction of Roger Wellinger and the later Beta 21 caliber, which were all high frequency quartz wristwatches.

Initiative

On May 7, 1965, it was the last day of our managers’ three weeks trip to America, when I contacted my friend Rolf Lochinger to inform him on the negative results of my recent investigations on using piezoelectric ceramics and crystals to drive metallic resonators, such as the Accutron tuning fork. Frei's conclusion was to abandon the prevailing strategy of improving the Accutron and embark on a new type of wristwatch instead, one which was controlled by a single quartz crystal oscillator, rather than an acoustic tuning fork. This idea had two consequences, one was to terminate Forrer's unsuccessful Beta project of improving the Accutron watch and secondly it opened up an entirely new area of very high precision wristwatches never encountered before! Lochinger was terminating his atomic-decay-based project and joined in with enthusiasm. If it succeeds, its going to be a milestone in history of watch making if it turns out to be a failure, it was at least fun to do it!

Montre-Bracelet à Quartz

Based on previous experience with quartz, Frei proposed to use a single crystal quartz oscillator at acoustic frequency, say in the range of 10 kHz, miniaturize it by orders of magnitude down to dimensions required for wristwatches. The requirement of size and power consumption was here predominant. Lochinger proposed to investigate into integrated electronic circuits suited to master increased divisional ratios. Here the requirement of power consumption was predominant. This was a true alternative to the existing Beta project of Forrer, see above. True, the new project was risky and definitely not to the minds of our cautious department head, but would certainly have a great impact on the watch industry if successful. Frei and Lochinger started their initiative immediately and agreed mutually to investigate into a new project.

New Strategy

In November 1965, Roger Wellinger, director CEH and responsible for the yearly strategy and plan, declared the "Montre-bracelet à quartz" to become the primary strategic goal for the year 1966.⁷ This was a direct consequence of Armin Frei having designed, built and operated successfully a miniaturized quartz oscillator prototype showing feasibility of a quartz wristwatch in the 10 kHz range in 4Q65. In 1Q66, Frei disposed already of a miniaturized quartz oscillator prototype with an 8192 Hz quartz resonator (picture), a novel fully integrated driver circuit running at less than four microamps current consumption (black epoxy covered IC with red dot) and a frequency adjustment set-up (upper black epoxy covered IC without a dot), all these components survived till and including the industrial phase with minor improvements only. At that time, the term "Montre-bracelet à quartz" appeared the first time officially in CEH's documents, and it had to be defended against the many internal and external opponents of this new direction. Never mind the rest of the quartz wristwatch was still not worked out yet or decided upon, Wellinger requested that a general systems invention disclosure on the "Montre-bracelet électronique à quartz" had to be worked out.⁸ To be conform with the Swiss watch industry and to warrant his career opportunities, the head of the circuits department, Max Forrer, refused to take on the new quartz wristwatch project. This in turn forced Wellinger to assume full responsibility on Frei's quartz wristwatch project, caused substantial agonies within management and eventually terminated Forrer's low frequencies Beta project with the metallic tuning fork and electromagnetic and piezoelectric actuators. – The situation at Seiko, the Japanese competitor, had been much different. They could rely on the experience with quartz clocks and electronic time keeping which they collected since 1956 (Olympics). They were developing their own quartz technology since 1958 and gradually developed quartz resonators for clocks, pocket watches and then for men's wristwatches successively. 

The first Quartz Wristwatch: Beta 1

The first quartz wristwatch was Beta 1 and it had been built at the Centre Electronique Horloger. The first unit of a series of five was assembled and tested at the CEH in July 1967 by Jean Hermann and François Niklès.³ Since Seiko does not communicate any details about their first quartz wristwatch, we can firmly conclude that Beta 1 was the world's first quartz wristwatch worldwide. The new watch was packed into a standard square case (picture), this was necessary because the quartz case itself was straight with a length of 27 mm. However, the overall dimensions satisfied perfectly the requirements set by the watch industry to qualify for a men's wristwatch. The watch with the identification number CEH-1020 was tested at the Observatory in Neuchâtel as of August 13, 1967⁴, and reached a classification of 0.189, which means an improvement of about one order of magnitude as compared to classical chronometers.⁵ The classification was also much better than the one which was reached by tuning fork watches during the same period. Beta 1 was equipped with a stepping motor activating the second hand step by step. The alternative and later model Beta 2 was equipped with the same quartz oscillator like Beta 1, but the second hand was actuated by a 256 Hz vibrating motor and a ratchet wheel. 

Beta 1 and its Components

The main elements of the watch and their primary contributors, including parts as well as concepts are described below:

Quartz Resonator: While the size of commercial quartz standards in those days was as big as radio tubes, we had to strive for physical dimensions to be small enough to allow the device to be mounted inside a men's wristwatch case. To keep the electronics simple, the frequency had to be 2 to the power of n (n being an integer) in Hertz in order to produce pulses with a period of one second at the end of the divider chain. Requirements which are very much contradictory, because if the dimensions are reduced the frequency goes up and vice versa. Further, we learned from experiments that quartz resonators with the shape of a tuning fork and fabricated with the technology of those days exhibit a much inferior factor of quality Q as compared to straight quartz bars. The solution to all these requirements was an x-y cut quartz bar with a length of 24 mm and with an eigenfrequency of 2¹³ = 8192 Hz (picture). The small dimensions of the quartz in its metal case as well as the extremely stringent requirements of mechanical precision, stability and lifetime required special attention with regards to most of the physical parameters: Leakage rates of the case and its feed-through had to be inferior to 5 10⁻¹² Torr ltr/s, organic and inorganic deposition on the surface had to be less than 20 Angstrom thick, metallurgy and soldering of wires onto the quartz surfaces had to be free from any unwanted inclusion, high precision soldering within a fraction of one millimeter was required to reach high quality factors of the resonator and many others. The quartz on the picture was developed and tested by Armin Frei in 1965, Oscilloquartz in Neuchâtel provided for the raw material and Richard Challandes was responsible for the assembly. X-y cut bar quartz, similar to the one on the picture but with increased frequency, had been produced in Switzerland for watches until 1977. As of 1979, the Swiss watch industry produced their 32 kHz quartz tuning fork resonators in Grenchen, Solothurn, licensing Jürgen Staudte's patent on etching quartz tuning forks (USA Patent Jürgen Staudte, 1972).

Oscillator Circuit: A number of different circuits for driving quartz oscillators were available at the time (Clapp oscillator, etc.), none of them fulfilled the necessary requirements for our quartz wristwatch: Say no coupling capacitances, low total resistors value on the chip, tolerance to the integrated circuits fabrication process and its deviations, rigid operational stability and low power consumption. This for bipolar IC's as well as for low battery voltages. – The newly developed symmetric cross coupled driver circuit as shown on the picture, incorporates a minimum of four resistors with pairwise equal values Rc and Rₑ as well as two transistors Tr₁ and Tr₂ and fulfills the above requirements extremely well. The emitter resistors serve as current sources and the collector resistors provide for the negative impedances to drive the quartz. The circuit exhibits a negative impedance of -2Rc approximately measured between the contacts 1 and 2. The circuit was very tolerant to various applications and conditions, and easy to fabricate. It took our specialists of the semiconductor pilot line, Raymond Guye and his colleagues, less than two months to ship the first fully integrated properly working chips. The circuit was developed and tested by Armin Frei in 1965 and 1966.

Frequency Adjustment: The first step in the process of adjusting the frequency to the desired value was carefully grinding off surplus material and weight at the ends of the quartz bar until a frequency was reached which, after evacuation of the case, resulted in exactly 2¹³ Hz. A very difficult and tedious job indeed. A fourteen stage divider chain would bring this frequency down to exactly one half of one Hz required to drive the stepping motor. – What about aging and other disturbing effects afterwards and during wear? To take care of this, a fine tuning mechanism was needed. A stepwise variable capacitor was hooked up in series with the quartz to change the oscillating frequency of the quartz assembly by 0.2 sec/day upward or downward (picture). At that time, Fritz Leuenberger of the semiconductor department started his research on MOS transistors, an excellent chance to integrate on a single chip a series of discrete MOS capacitors, high value and small volume, exactly what we wanted. The design and layout was made in 1966 by Armin Frei, the semiconductor department delivered the MOS capacitor chip and the watch maker technician Claude Challandes designed the miniature switch.

Temperature Compensation: The irregularities in timekeeping of quartz wristwatches are due to the temperature sensitivity of the various physical parameters of the quartz crystal itself and are not due to the electronics attached to it. The deviation in time is measured in seconds per day as a function of temperature. The resulting plot, usually displayed between 4° C and 36° C is a complicated function of the cutting angles relative to the axes of the quartz crystal itself. At the time, it was well known that the x-y cut quartz crystals exhibit parabolic curves according to the curve a) in the picture. We were very much aware that the manufacturers of the current mechanical watches were keen to keep the temperature deviation as small as possible, so we engaged strongly in the disciplines of temperature compensation. First investigations using temperature sensitive resistors and capacitors were not very successful. Jean Hermann proposed in 1967, shortly before the very first quartz wristwatch was operating, a scheme using the parabolic behavior twice and a switch to connect a compensating capacitor at 12° C according to curve b). This scheme was easy to implement, produced favorable results with the observatory tests and was effective during daily usage. Yet, it required extensive interventions by the laboratory director on behalf of the department head in order not to drop the brilliant idea. The resulting Thermo Compensation Module (TCM) was developed by Jean Hermann and was implemented using MOS technology by Fritz Leuenberger and his group in 1967.

Frequency Divider: Since the very beginning of the quartz wristwatch project, Armin Frei decided that the oscillating frequency of the quartz had to be 2¹³ = 8192 Hz. Consequently, for Beta 1 using a stepping motor to drive the second hand, see below, a total of 14 binary flip-flop stages were required to drive the motor of the watch with pulses of half a Hertz repetition frequency. The flip-flops which were finally incorporated in the Beta 1 prototypes (picture), were designed by Jean Fellrath and implemented in integrated form by Raymond Guye and his group in bipolar technology. The circuits were optimized for low power consumption of approximately one microamp per stage and for high operational stability. While integrated counter stages at microwatt level existed since before, the flip-flop shown exhibits a new type of triggering circuits, one of them on each side, and it also uses direct coupling between collectors and opposite base similar to the oscillator circuits, see above. – In bipolar technology the divider chain with 14 stages represented a big load for the battery, limiting its lifetime to less than one year, much to the concern of certain members of the governing board. The immediate solution to that would have been a reduction of the number of divider stages, say 5, reduce the frequency to 256 Hz rather than half a Hz and use a vibrating motor rather than a stepping motor. This was alternatively proposed with the Beta 2 and the Beta 21 projects 1967 and 1968 respectively. – However, the real solution to the power consumption problem were ultimately the Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor circuits (CMOS), which had been invented in USA (Frank Wanlass, 1963) a couple of years before.

Stepping Motor: All that was left was to convert the pulses appearing at the end of the divider chain into step by step advancements of the second hand. Jean Hermann and François Niklès proposed in 1967 a simple solution of such a stepping motor for Beta 1, as seen in the picture. The setup incorporated an anchor wheel and an anchor which were responsible for the go and stop of the second hand. Much different as in mechanical watches, where the anchor and the anchor wheel act as escapement, here the anchor drives the anchor wheel by wiggling forth and back. The anchor was activated by means of a bobbin coil, which was attached to the anchor and which was magnetized by bipolar electric pulses. The duration and the amplitude of the pulses had to be well controlled to warrant proper operation and to save battery power. The duration of the pulses was derived from the pulse pattern appearing along the divider chain using boolean logic. The concept and the basics had been worked out as early as 1966.

Beta 2

Autonomy

The office of the governing assembly had little sympathy for the new direction with the quartz wristwatch. They were hoping for an electronic watch, exhibiting at least one advantage compared with existing electronic watches, remember the strategy, and here was a watch with a battery lifetime of less than one year! One representative of the office, not very familiar with electronics and its progress, made it a must: Lifetime had to be equal or longer than one year.

Current Saving Version

This in turn was the starting point of a fatal new strategic direction: A current saving alternative project, called Beta 2, was proposed and initiated in November 1966 by Max Forrer and Henri Oguey. Beta 2 was using the same oscillator like Beta 1, but had only five flip-flops instead of fourteen as Beta 1. With five stages, a frequency of 256 Hz was reached, just right to drive one of Henri Oguey's vibrating motors. Battery lifetime was above one year. The first Beta 2 caliber was assembled in August 1967, one month later than Beta 1.

Beta 21

Industrial Version

After the splendid celebration of the outstanding results reached with Beta 1 and Beta 2 following the observatory tests, on February 15, 1968, investigations on how to establish a technology transfer from the prototypes towards a product started immediately. First, it was decided to favor Beta 2, not Beta 1. This decision was commented by Henri Oguey and Henri Schneider simply by: "Au vu de l'expérience aquise sur les prototypes, seul le système Bêta 2 entre en ligne de compte pour assurer une durée de vie de la pile supérieure à un an." (In view of the experience acquired with the prototypes, only the Beta 2 system can be considered to ensure a battery life of more than one year). The industrial caliber was named Beta 21, consisted of the 8192 Hz oscillator, a five stage binary divider chain and the vibrating motor at 256 Hz. On April 10, 1970, during the "Foire Suisse de Bâle", four months after Seiko's Astron SQ35, some 20 Swiss firms launched their products, all incorporating the Beta 21 movement. 

Industrial Flop

Beta 21 turned out to be a flop. Some 6000 units were sold, then the line with the vibrating motor was discontinued. To solve an intermediate power problem (autonomy) by pushing the vibrating motor version turned out to be a severe strategic error with a number of consequences. Indeed, the power problem was not a systems problem but a semiconductor problem. Using Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductors (CMOS) circuit technology instead of Bipolars (BIP) would have saved exceeding amounts of energy by orders of magnitude. CMOS was invented in 1963 and was applied later on throughout the watch industry. The CEH started early on MOS, however produced stable CMOS with silicon gate technology at a voltage level of 1.35 V only after 1972. Instead of pushing research after the splendid success at the observatory, CEH engaged excessively in technology transfer and manufacturing, losing lead time and research competence. – Not enough of all that, with their Astron 35SC the Japanese proved feasibility of an industrial watch with a stepping motor and battery lifetime of over one year.

Bibliography

1) Forrer, M. (1965). “Mémo Technique 101”, CEH, February 25, 1965. 

2) Hetzel, M. (1963). “The Application of Electricity and Electronics to Wristwatches”, Horological Journal, 1963, p 233.

3) Hermann, J. (1967). “Rapport d'activité du mois de Juillet 1967”, CEH, July 31, 1967. 

4) Trueb, L. (2007). “Die weltweit erste Quarz-Armbanduhr”, gold'or, 2/2007.

5) République et Canton de Neuchâtel (1968). “Concours chronométrique 1967”, February 15, 1968. 

6) Wellinger, R. (1965). “Orientations calibres”, Protocole séance du bureau d'administration, April 13, 1965. 

7) Wellinger, R. (1965). “CEH Programme de travail 1966”, Protocole séance du bureau d'administration, November 26, 1965. 

8) Forrer, M., Frei, A., Lochinger, R. & Oguey, H. (1966). “Montre-bracelet électronique à quartz”, Rapport d'invention, CEH 66/73, February 4, 1966. 

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