Stop 103 of 109 · Fifty-One Parts
1983 · Grenchen, Switzerland
The Watch Built From Fifty-One Parts That Helped Save an Industry
Through the 1970s, cheap quartz watches were dismantling Swiss watchmaking. In 1983, a plastic watch that could be built by machine helped save it.
Through the 1970s, cheap quartz watches from abroad were dismantling Switzerland's watch industry, the era now remembered as the "quartz crisis." Between 1970 and 1988, Swiss watchmaking employment fell from around 90,000 people to 28,000.
The answer, in 1983, came from ETA in Grenchen, where engineers Elmar Mock and Jacques Müller, working under Ernst Thomke, designed a quartz watch built almost entirely differently from anything before it: just 51 parts, against roughly 91 in a classic Swiss watch, seated directly into a moulded plastic case, held together with rivets and ultrasonic welding instead of screws.
Twelve Swatch models launched in Zürich on 1 March 1983. Over half a million sold in the first year alone, and the plastic, cheerful little watch helped bring buyers back to Swiss watchmaking at the exact moment it needed them most.
One thing it was never built for, though, was repair: the glass is welded directly onto the case by ultrasound, sealed for good. Only the battery, through a small hatch in the back, was ever meant to be changed.