Four Revolutions: Part 3: A Concise History Of The Mechanical Watch Revolution (1976-1989)

By Joe Thompson

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Editor’s note: This is the latest in a series of articles on four revolutions over the past 40 years that have created the modern watch world. Previous articles include Joe Thompson’s Introduction to the series, A Concise History Of The Quartz Watch Revolution, and A Concise History Of The Fashion Watch Revolution. This installment will be in two parts, with the second coming next week.

In 1976, with the watch world agog over LEDs, LCDs and quartz analogs, George Daniels, the world’s greatest living watchmaker, was fed up. “I was furious with ‘electricians,’” he told Norma Buchanan, my colleague on American Time magazine, in 1999. “Electricians” was Daniels’s disdainful term for proponents of electronic watches, as well as the electric watch which was its forerunner. “I was angry with the way they just strode through the watch world saying, ‘This is the future.’”

Daniels got mad and vowed to get even. He got to work in his native Britain inventing a new mechanical escapement. “Daniels had been pondering the lever-escapement problem [i.e., friction requiring lubrication] for most of his life,” Buchanan reported, “but it was the quartz revolution that catapulted him into action. He wanted to prove that mechanical watches were as good as quartz – even better, because they didn’t need batteries.”


George Daniels

Daniels had an idea for a new escapement with two escape wheels instead of the traditional one, superimposed on the same axle, that he believed would make mechanical watches more accurate and require less service. A new co-axial escapement – that would show the electricians!

Daniels’s response to the quartz crisis was more than quaint. It was certifiably crackpot: the notion that in 1976 a new and improved escapement would prevent the mechanical’s rendezvous with the buggy whip on history’s scrap heap was laughable. The mechanical watch was doomed and everybody, absolutely everybody, in the watch industry knew it – except, it seemed, George Daniels. Daniels was, indeed, laughed at.


A look at the movement of Daniels’s exceptional Space Traveller pocket watch.

But he would have the last laugh. The mechanical watch, as we know, defied its doom and staged one of the most astonishing comebacks in the history of industry. It was a long, hard slog. (It would be 23 years before Daniels saw his Co-Axial escapement go into …read more      

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