Inside Norman Foster’s Reimagined Norton Museum

So, quartz is a mineral that totally reshaped the watch market. But what is it? As it relates to watches, quartz is a stand-in for the complicated arrangement of gears and wheels that make mechanical watches work. Think of a grandfather clock: it keeps time by swinging a pendulum once every second. Quartz keeps time in a similar way (by completing an action once every second), but the mineral’s way is much more accurate. Quartz naturally vibrates a very precise 32,768 times each second. When hooked up to a small electric motor, quartz sends an electric signal on every 32,768th vibration, which then makes the hands tick forward every second. (Quartz watches produce the effect we’re thinking of when we imagine a watch’s signature tick tick tick; hands on a mechanical watch glide.)

And although quartz would one day democratize the watch industry, it didn’t start that way. The Seiko Astron, the very first quartz watch available to consumers, was originally made available on Christmas Day 1969 for $8,000, the equivalent of over $50,000 today. Prices plunged quickly, though: By the mid ‘70s, a quartz watch ran in the low double digits. Japanese brands like Seiko ate up large chunks of those sales. But the Swiss watch industry finally came up with an answer to its problem when Nicolas Hayek started Swatch in1983 and started exporting millions of plastic watches around the globe. Now Swatch is the de facto starter watch for mallgoers.

Watches, once only available to those well-heeled enough to buy one, suddenly flooded the market. To this day, quartz is what the average person wears on their wrist everyday. A watch that can be had for less than a couple hundred dollars—so, most watches from the likes of Swatch, Casio, Seiko, Shinola, Timex, Daniel Wellington, and the rest—is most likely powered by quartz.

In response to the cheaper and more accurate quartz watches, prestige watchmakers like Patek Philippe started pushing craftsmanship, their heirloom-grade quality, and nebulous qualities like soul. These are great qualities to sell collectors on who are now willing to spend millions of dollars on the very best mechanical watches. But who needs soul when a quartz-powered Casio watch can be bought today for $11?