Most wouldn’t consider today’s Seiko Astron a luxury watch, but when the Japanese company released it in 1969 as the first quartz-oscillating electronic watch to market, it cost as much as a mid-sized Japanese sedan. The initial run was around 100 units in solid gold, and they sold out quickly. Though Piaget, Patek Philippe, and Omega were developing quartz movements through the 1960s, the Swiss simply didn’t get their act together in time to compete with Seiko. The Astron effectively kicked off what people now call the quartz crisis: a period during the 1970s that saw around 1,000 Swiss watch companies go belly-up and the industry’s workforce shrink from 90,000 to below 30,000 by the end of the decade.
While it may be easy to write off the Astron as merely a technological leap, the original models were rather avant-garde in form and crafted from solid gold within the hand-made traditions of Japan. The hand-etched case with its wide flanks and the vertically striated gold-tone dial set the style for a number of watches to follow, including variations on the form from Zenith, Omega, TAG Heuer, and many more. The originals are rare and expensive and don’t come up for sale often. Meanwhile, the 50th-anniversary edition of 2019 has fetched as much as $36,000 on the secondary market. It would be wrong to remember the early Astron as only a disruptive watch; it was that, but it put high-end Japanese watchmaking on the map and cleared a path toward a distinctive—and much imitated—mid-century style.
From the article by Allen Farmelo, Paige Reddinger, Victoria Gomelsky, Oren Hartov, Blake Buettner
