The History of the Quartz Watch

Quartz watchmakers in Japan especially figure out how to manufacture these new watches at low costs and they could sell them at much lower prices than the highly crafted mechanical Swiss watches. Semi-conductors basically allowed for these watches to mimic the many possible functions of very high-end Swiss watches, but at a fraction of the cost. In Switzerland, this is referred to as the quartz crisis. Watch exports from Switzerland to the rest of the world peaked in 1974, and a decade later they had fallen by half.