How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Quartz Watches

Like many people of my generation my first watch was a Swatch - or more specifically a Flik Flak kids watch given to me by my grandfather after one of his trips to Europe in the early 1990s. I didn't know it then but that was the start of something of an obsession. Back then the whole “quartz=bad” mentality common in the watch community these days (especially among people just starting down the rabbit hole) really didn’t matter. It was MY watch and it was COOL.

Press photo courtesy of Swatch/Flik Flak

From middle school and into high school I was in the Boy Scouts, naturally one of the things you want to have alongside your pocket knife is a trusty watch. At that time I inevitably had one of the ubiquitous “tough” watches, a Timex Ironman Triathlon, I can’t remember if there was any reason why I got that over something else like a G-Shock but honestly it was probably just that it was cheaper. I still have that watch though the original strap snapped off and was replaced by a cheap nato long ago.

Timex Ironman Triathlon

Years later as I was re-discovering watches on my own I found myself falling into that same trap after countless blog posts and YouTube videos preaching “why would you want some shitty quartz watch, automatics are superior!”. Having mostly been exposed to the inescapable ticking of cheap Timex analogue models that was pretty much all I thought quartz could ever be but then I fell down the hole further and started learning about the history of quartz and the so-called “quartz crisis”. I’ll have to expand on my thoughts about that period at a later date because that is a whole other can of worms. While browsing through listings for vintage Seikos I kept running into Lord Quartz, King Quartz, and Grand Quartz. The more I saw them the more I was intrigued up until the point I caved and bought one out of curiosity. I was hooked.

Seiko 0853-8001 King Quartz

My experience with that first vintage King Quartz was quite eye-opening to just how special and premium quartz was in those early years before the technology progressed to the point of being able to be cheaply produced and disposable. From then on I realized that just because a watch has a quartz movement doesn’t mean it is cheap or any less valid than any mechanical watch. With that said there is a very real appeal to the more cost effective nature of quartz watches, you can get some absolutely killer stuff for a fraction of what the mechanical equivalent would go for.

IWC Porsche Design IW3732

There is no getting around the fact that spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on a completely outdated and irrelevant piece of technical jewelry is crazy. Why do we do it? I guess that applies to just about any hobby, it is purely for enjoyment. Through high school and college one source of enjoyment was Top Gear, or at least the incarnation with Jeremy Clarkson , Richard Hammond, and James May. A stand-out snippet of their shenanigans was during a “News” segment where they were discussing Porsche Design products and Jeremy put the lit bowl end of a pipe into his mouth (because its a 911 Porsche so the hot bit goes at the back, naturally) which went well in true Top Gear fashion. In re-watching that episode years later I figured I’d poke around on eBay and see what Porsche Design stuff was available which is when I ran into that awesome IWC chronograph. That was all I needed to cement my conversion to loving quartz watches.