Welcome to Geneva. Or rather, welcome back to Geneva for me. I was just here about a month ago yapping for 5 hours on a radio show. It is great to be back here.
But even more exciting for me is to be alive right now, sharing this moment with the watchmaking community and everyone else who is excited about quartz. And if you aren’t yet, hopefully you will be by the end of this delirious talk on the future.
Now, I know that the first instinct someone might have when they see a person dancing around, being so excited about this moment, is a diagnosis: quartz psychosis. I prefer a different term. I have quartz delirium. Quartz euphoria.
But I think it’s worth wrestling with the fact that, on the one hand, this is tremendously exciting, and it is also a little unnerving. We don’t know exactly what the final state of this is going to be. That’s a weird state to be in, even if you’re excited for the future, even if you’re excited for the present. And I fully understand the sense of unease that can create.
So to soothe that somewhat, let’s wind back the clock a little bit. Literally, because that is our industry.
This is state-of-the-art timekeeping from the 14th century. If you wanted to know the time in the 14th century, you hired a man to watch the sand fall and tell you. And in 1810, Eli Terry started mass-producing mechanical clocks. All of these timekeepers realized that the craftsmanship of counting sand, you know what, that was going to be different. The job was going to be different, because suddenly there was competition from a new form of technology.
So they pivoted. They realized that counting sand was no longer an economically viable skill. They needed another skill, another domain. One of those men was my ancestor, Henri d'Heinemière. He started a clock company.
On November 24th of last year, we got the Seiko Caliber 35A. A tiny chunk of quartz and a battery, more accurate than any mechanical movements we ever made. For me, that was the tipping point. There is everything before November 24th, and everything after. This is the date that history books will mark as the inflection point for the age of quartz.
Look at this. This is the Heinemière 3310, our finest movement. 31 jewels. Accurate to about 5 seconds a day. Now look at this quartz movement. It’s accurate to about 5 seconds a month. Look at all the things we’re not doing. All the balance springs we’re not adjusting. All the watchmakers we’re not paying.
But what does that mean? Well, at Heinemière-Anson, a couple of weeks ago, we decided that it clearly means we’re done assembling movements by hand. We have gone tweezers down. If I’d put this slide up 2 or 3 months ago and made the same proclamation, a fair number of people would have thought, that dude’s got a screw loose. And now it’s just a recognition of what’s already there.
I mean just look at it again. It is inhumane to ask people of flesh and blood to subject their eyeballs to this. But you know what? If I never have to look at it, if all I have to do is revel in watches being 30 times more accurate, I love quartz! Quartz is amazing if you never, ever, ever have to do it yourself.
This is one of the reasons I love working with quartz: I don’t know how it works at all. I consider that a feature. Yes! It’s a privilege to have no fucking clue what the piezoelectric effect is. I evaluate the movement as a black box, from the outside, like any man in history who has ever commissioned a watch.
I hear you ask, Monsieur Davide, if the movement now costs you $5 to make, why do your watches still cost $30000? Because it says Heinemière-Anson on the dial. The movement does not change the name. It only changes our margins.
And what about the apprentice watchmakers, the young man who spent 10 years learning to cut his own escapement wheel? He is now competing with a quartz movement that is more accurate and costs nothing.
Well, sucks to be you. Have you considered being founded in 1816?