First, the energy needed to vibrate the crystal at 4.1mHz meant the battery usually lasted only a few months - and, of course, the watch stopped and had to be reset when the battery was changed - so the much-vaunted long-term accuracy was ephemeral. Unfortunately, such accuracy came with two costs. It took them until 1975 to do it but the Crystron outperformed the Omega, both in the rate at which the crystal oscillated and in its accuracy of three seconds a year. It made no sense to announce themselves as the world’s second producer of quartz watches, so they decided to make the world’s most accurate quartz watch: the Citizen Crystron Mega. When Seiko introduced the world’s first quartz wristwatch at the end of 1969, it presented its Japanese rivals Citizen with a problem.

Launched in 1974 as the Omega Marine Chronometer, it came with a certificate stating that every watch had been tested by the Besançon Observatory for 63 days and listed the results achieved at the tests. The Beta 21 used a rate of 8,192Hz the lens-shaped, Omega-developed crystal had a rate of 2,359,356Hz and promised accuracy of one second per month. So it was natural that the Omega researchers working on their own quartz movement looked at the possibility of increasing the rate at which the quartz crystal oscillated. At the end of the Sixties a lot of research was being put into faster balances in the search for accuracy in mechanical timekeeping Seiko, Girard-Perregaux and Zenith all introduced watches beating at 36,000 beats per hour (or 5Hz) - twice the rate of most other watches. The researchers at Omega, who were one of the major participants in the Beta 21 project (the first commercially available Swiss quartz movement) decided to develop their own quartz movement. Nobody in normal life actually needed the accuracy of the best mechanical watches, so the quartz models could be seen as overkill, but the desire for improved accuracy wouldn’t lie down and die. The very best mechanical timepieces were accurate to one or two seconds a day while the first quartz watches offered accuracy of five seconds per month.

Quartz was so accurate that mechanical timepieces were considered irrelevant and development ceased for around 30 years. From Christiaan Huygens’ first watch to the observatory tests of the Seventies, it has been 300-plus years of constant development, but the introduction of quartz timepieces in the early Seventies brought that progress to a grinding halt. The story of the mechanical timepiece has always been one of relentless progress towards accuracy, usually by tiny, gradual increments.

Seiko 9f accurate 5 seconds per year