These issues damaged the reputation of electric watches. LIP’s technology used fixed coils and a diode but required two batteries. The earliest models from Hamilton mounted the coil on the balance, where it was easily damaged, and had thin, fragile wires that were susceptible to sparking. These components provided more consistent energy flow, which should improve timing accuracy, and would run for months or years without use.Įlectric watches never lived up to their promise. Conceptually, the battery and coil replace the mainspring, barrel, and impulse pallets, with the rest of the movement components mostly unchanged fro mechanical watches. Some use mechanical contacts to switch the current on and off while others use a diode or simple electronic circuit with a transistor. 500 was primitive and unreliableĮlectric watches from Hamilton, Elgin, and LIP (and many others later) are characterized by their use of a battery for power, an electromagnetic coil which transfers this energy to the balance, and a conventional gear train. Hamilton delivered the first electric watch in 1957, but Cal. Their first electric watch, announced in 1957, was much more primitive than the LIP and Elgin designs but a futuristic triangular case, and an appearance on the wrist of Elvis, gave the Hamilton Ventura a huge marketing boost. While LIP and Elgin struggled in public to develop their electric watch, another American firm, Hamilton, was quietly working on a similar design. So it is logical that challengers in France, Germany, and the United States would play a key role in creating alternatives to mechanical watch movements.

But dominant companies are rarely interested in disrupting their own market. Swiss engineers were interested in electronic timekeeping, and had been involved in development of quartz and electronics. And once production got underway in the 1960s, this would become a major problem for the Swiss. Rather than re-build a mechanical watchmaking base after the war, France, Germany, and the United States focused on electronics. When the French LIP and American Elgin companies promised a battery-powered watch in 1951, it was seen as an attack by the Swiss. The Swiss industry was dominant after World War II and did not have much tolerance for new watch movement concepts. Rumors of an electric watch were rampant in the early 1950s

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