"Is Quartz Finally Cool?"

That's a headline at Time & Tide, an Australian website devoted to watches. They're asking whether quartz watches are cool now. The answer is no. Time & Tide, for some reason, have jumped onto the quartz bandwagon with both feet, and all it's done is make Time & Tide less cool.

For decades, there have been only two kinds of cool watches with quartz in them: Casio G-Shocks, indestructible, mostly very cheap quartz watches, mostly with digital readouts, with various additional functions, timers, alarms, lights etc, on various models, popular with military commandos and action-adventure movie tough guys; and Grand Seiko Spring Drives, which, although each one has a piece of quartz in it, aren't really "quartz watches" in the usual sense. As the name implies, a Spring Drive is driven by a spring. The quartz is there to help it run more accurately. I don't understand how, but I still think it's really cool -- and definitely NOT a quartz watch. They cost four figures and up. The G-Shock, like most devices referred to as "quartz watches," is powered by a battery which needs to be replaced every now and then. No battery in the Spring Drive.

There are also no batteries in some electronic watches, such as those powered by light, which strikes me as being much cooler than the battery-driven option. Do they also each have a piece of quartz crystal inside, like the Grand Seiko Spring Drive, to make them more accurate? I'm not sure, which should give you some idea of the overall quality of this blog post. I think they do. In any case, in most devices referred to as "quartz watches," there are batteries which need to be replaced every couple of years or so, more often if unusual stress is put on the battery by constantly turning on a light in the dial or by heavy use of some other extra functions. Some G-Shocks are described as "solar." Does this mean they use light instead of batteries, or in addition to batteries? I don't know. Some G-Shocks can be had for as little as $30 or so, most for under $100, and a very few extra-fancy ones cost more than $1000.

Some people say that this is all very simple: quartz watches are better, they say, because the purpose of a watch is to tell time, and quartz watches are more accurate. These people are completely missing the point of watch ownership. We have accurate electronic timepieces in our laptops and phones, on the dashboards of our cars, in our TV's and radios and microwave ovens and so forth. We wear watches because we like them, not because we need them. It's been quite a while since anybody has actually needed a watch. Rather than actually using our watches to tell time, we use all of the above-mentioned electronic timepieces to measure how accurate our spring-driven watches are.

The brilliant watch manufacturer Urwerk recently underscored this point when they introduced a watch sold together with a suitcase-sized portable atomic clock which very, very accurately sets the time on the watch.

Combined price: over two and a half million dollars, mostly for the atomic clock, although it's a very, very nice spring-driven watch, as are all Urwerk watches. I wonder how many people get the joke.