March 2026
In the early 1970s disaster struck the Swiss watch industry. Now people call it the quartz crisis, but in fact it was a compound of three separate disasters that all happened at about the same time.
The first was competition from Japan. The Swiss had been watching the Japanese in the rear view mirror all through the 1960s, and they'd been improving at an alarming rate. But even so the Swiss were surprised in 1968 when the Japanese swept all the top spots for mechanical watches at the Geneva Observatory trials.
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