Why the Seiko Astron Might be the Most Important Watch of the 20th Century

Among today’s Seiko watch models and collections, it’s fair to say that the Seiko Astron does not receive nearly the amount of love from enthusiasts and collectors as do its contemporaries, like the Prospex and Presage models and even the budget-friendly 5 Sport series. And yet I believe a substantial case can be made that the Astron — at least, the first watch to bear that name, way back at the collection’s inception in 1969 — is the most important watch of the 20th Century. The first watch to the market with a quartz movement, the Seiko Astron was a game-changer for the entire watch industry, with an impact that is still being felt today. When Seiko revived the Astron in 2012 after a long hiatus, it was with the recognition that the model represented a quantum leap in watchmaking technology and the determination to take it to the next level. Seiko has fulfilled that promise with subsequent editions of the modern Astron, which brought GPS technology into watchmaking much as the original brought quartz. Here is the story of the Seiko Astron and its 50-plus-year journey to the cutting edge of technology.

The Road to Quartz: 1952 - 1968

The quartz watch movement, as with many other groundbreaking inventions, did not emerge from a single burst of creative vision, but ultimately proved to be the most workable version of many such mechanisms, all aimed toward addressing the same industry-wide challenge. As I explore in greater depth in my article on the History of Timekeeping Accuracy, the mission to bring electronic technology into watchmaking had been underway for more than a decade before the Astron’s debut at the end of the 1960s. It was U.S.-based Elgin and France-based Lip that took the first steps, releasing their electronic-motor-driven prototype watches on the same day in 1952, though neither would be ready for commercial release until years later. Another American watchmaker, Hamilton, took the lead in the race shortly thereafter, releasing its groundbreaking Ventura model, the world’s first fully electric watch, in 1957. You can read more about that watch, and its technical and pop cultural impact, here. And yet another brand from the U.S., New York City’s Bulova, upped the ante three years later with the release of the tuning-fork-driven Accutron. 

Early advertisement for Bulova Accutron

In the interim between the Ventura and the Accutron, however, Japan’s Suwa Seikosha and K.Hattori & Co. — the two companies that make up today's Seiko — had initiated their “59A Project,” which kicked off in 1959 and laid the foundation for quartz movement technology. The core concept was a watch movement powered by a 1.5V battery charge through a rapidly vibrating quartz crystal. Seiko’s engineers optimized the idea for mass production with their development of a photo-lithographic process to make the crystals using hydrofluoric acid, and then by suspending them in a shock-proof vacuum capsule and controlling their temperature via a thermo-variable condenser. Seiko introduced the technology in a tabletop clock, called the Crystal Chronometer, in 1963, the first of several such clocks that would go on to win chronometry prizes in their category at the Neuchâtel Observatory competition. Seiko put its Crystal Chronometer clocks to the test in 1964, at the Olympic Games in Tokyo, for which the brand had been chosen as official timekeeper. 

Seiko Crystal Chronometer clock

From the beginning, Seiko intended to adapt the new technology for use in wristwatches, The first step came in 1967, with the Suwa Seikosha quartz pocket watch, another Neuchâtel Observatory chronometry prize winner. The challenge Seiko’s engineers faced, and ultimately solved before any of its competitors, was the size and power consumption of the electric motor that turned the quartz crystal’s oscillations into motive power for the hands. Seiko’s ingenious solution — which involved a space-saving redesign of the stator and rotor and the development of a six-pole stepper motor that required only one electrical pulse per second to rotate 60 degrees around the main motor — made the invention viable for use in the smaller confines of a wristwatch case. By 1968, Shoji Hattori, then president of Seiko, ceased all other parallel projects, such as the one focusing on an Accutron-like tuning fork system, to concentrate on miniaturizing and optimizing the company’s quartz-driven movement.

Beta-21 quartz watch from Patek Philippe, circa 1970s (photo: Sotheby's)

By this point, the Swiss had also gotten involved, with a consortium of heritage watchmakers including Omega, Piaget, and Patek Philippe joining forces in 1962 to establish the Centre Electronique Horloger SA (CEH), a think tank devoted to the mission of producing an electronic wristwatch. Spearheading the effort was René LeCoultre, a former Rolex executive and a scion of the legendary family that founded Jaeger-LeCoultre. The CEH exhibited its first prototype quartz movement, called the Beta-1, in July 1967, quickly followed it up with the more efficient Beta-2 and shortly thereafter, the culmination of CEH’s efforts, the Beta-21. None of the early watches made to house these movements was mass-produced or commercially sold. It wasn’t until 1970 that a number of Swiss companies — ranging from Longines to Piaget to Rolex and even Patek Philippe — exhibited watches with the Beta-21 movement at that year’s Basel fair.

Born on Christmas Day: The Seiko Quartz Astron 35SQ (1969)

Seiko Astron 35SQ, 1969

While the Swiss can take justifiable pride in producing the world’s first watches with a quartz movement, it was Japan’s Seiko that released the first such watch to the market — a game-changing move that truly changed the watch industry forever. Seiko called its watch the Astron 35SQ and released it on Christmas Day — December 25, 1969. The watch’s movement, Caliber 35A, differed from the mechanical movements that had traditionally powered wristwatches, which store their energy in a wound mainspring inside a barrel and release it through a complex series of gears to move the hands. Seiko’s  movement instead derived its power from a small electrical charge provided by a battery, which then passed through an integrated circuit that applied the charge to a tiny tuning-fork-shaped quartz crystal — rather than an actual tuning fork, as in the Accutron.

Seiko's quartz Caliber 35A

The incredibly high rate of that crystal’s vibration dwarfed that of a mechanical movement (32,768 times per second, as opposed to the 3 or 4 times per second offered by most mechanical oscillators), driving the seconds hand only once per second with the aid of a tiny motor, conserving energy and ensuring an accuracy of just -/+ 5 seconds per month. In a move that might seem peculiar in hindsight, the first commercial quartz wristwatch, the one that would usher in a never-before-seen level of democratization of pricing for watches, was decidedly luxurious in its trappings: the cushion-shaped case was made of yellow gold and priced at 450,000 yen, or about $1,250 — at the time, about the same price you’d pay for a Toyota Corolla. It was Hattori himself who dubbed the model “Astron” — a name that evoked the Space Race era in which it was conceived. 

Mass production of the Astron’s quartz movement began almost immediately after its yuletide debut, in 1970, and to say that it had an impact on the watchmaking world at large would be a huge understatement. Seiko started installing quartz movements throughout its lineup and other watchmakers, like Japan’s Citizen and Casio and the U.S.A.’s Timex, would also start releasing quartz watches. Traditional Swiss watch companies, which still dominated the industry but were notoriously slow to embrace this new technology — with a few notable exceptions, such as Longines — faced not only economic headwinds but downright extinction. Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, quartz watches — many of them made in Japan or other Asian countries — dominated the worldwide marketplace, offering customers greater accuracy at a fraction of the price that they would have paid for a mechanical watch. 

Longines Ultra-Quartz

The Swiss watchmaking community scrambled to catch up, first by making their own quartz watches and targeting them to a growing market of younger consumers, most prominently via the establishment of the Swatch brand in 1983; and eventually, by major consolidation and a renewed focus on high mechanics and high luxury in the booming ‘90s. For the Swiss, the Quartz Revolution was the Quartz Crisis, and it forced a wholesale restructuring of the entire watchmaking industry into the one we recognize today, dominated by large groups and a handful of independent power brands. 

As difficult as it may be for today’s community of Gen Z watch enthusiasts to believe, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say an entire generation of Americans came of age knowing little about wristwatches except that they needed battery changes every few years. However, the Astron model itself —  the “Patient Zero” of the quartz watch’s viral popularity, if you will — ceased production less than a year after its historic debut. The space-age name would not resurface for nearly 40 years.

The First GPS Solar Watch: Seiko Astron SSE003 (2012)

Seiko Astron GPS Solar SSE003

If the original Astron represented a quantum leap in horological high technology in 1969, the revival of the model in 2012 was another statement piece from Seiko, as the first analog wristwatch equipped with a solar-powered movement capable of receiving signals from GPS (global positioning system) satellites and instantly adjusting to any time zone on Earth. From a technology perspective, this combination of features set the new-generation Astron apart from other light-powered timepieces (like those with the Eco-Drive caliber developed by Seiko’s main competitor Citizen) and also from so-called “Radio-Controlled” watches, which receive time signals only when in range of terrestrial atomic clocks. With the push of a button on the case, the Astron’s wearer could change the local time by synching the watch’s built-in antenna with GPS signals, and adjust for Daylight Saving Time with another button push. The time transmitted by these signals is incredibly accurate and reliable — losing one second approximately every 100,000 years — and the movement could be charged constantly, no battery changes required, as long as it was regularly exposed to sunlight — or any light, really. 

As with the creation of the original Quartz Astron, Seiko needed to confront the challenges posed by the power consumption of a watch movement that could pick up satellite signals (up to 300 times the amount of power required to pick up such signals from radio towers). Despite the impressive miniaturization achieved with the design of its Caliber 7X52, the original Astron SSE003 was still pretty big: 47mm in diameter and 16.5mm thick, with a titanium case, a black dial, and either a rubber strap or titanium bracelet. The price started at $2,300 — not as prohibitively expensive as the first Quartz Astron, but certainly on the higher end for a Seiko. As it has always done with new innovations, Seiko continued to refine the Solar GPS movement in ensuing years. 

Seiko Astron GPS Solar Chronograph Novak Djokovic Limited Edition

In 2014, Seiko added chronograph functionality in the next generation of Astron, the 8X series, equipped with the new 8X82 caliber, which incorporated a smaller GPS antenna and enabled a reduction of the case size by 30 percent — to 44.6mm in diameter and 13.3mm thick. Additionally, Seiko improved the solar cell in the dial for greater light penetration to allow for a greater variety of dial colors. A non-chronograph version with the same streamlined dimensions also hit the market, the most noteworthy being the rose-gold coated limited edition, housing Caliber 8X53, made for tennis star Novak Djokovic in 2015, when the Serbian Grand Slam champion signed on as a Seiko ambassador. Several other special editions followed until Djokovic jumped ship to Hublot’s endorsement camp in 2021. 

Seiko Astron GPS Solar Dual Time Sport Titanium (SSH063)

Four years later, another version of the Astron emerged, called the 5X series and now boasting an even more compact case size of 42.9mm (12.2mm thick) — smaller than many of Seiko’s popular dive watches and now able to claim the title of the world’s thinnest GPS-equipped watch. A limited edition of 2,000 pieces, this model also introduced a buckle with a new, button-operated adjustment system. Following it up in the 5X series were the first titanium-cased models (Ref. SSH063). An improvement in the reception performance of the movement, Caliber 5X53, enabled a further streamlining in the design, with the large, ring-shaped antenna under the dial replaced by a centimeter-square “patch” antenna. Clearly, Seiko was striving with every subsequent version for the sweet spot between cutting-edge tech and wearability. 

But Seiko still wasn’t done. The 3X series of the Astron arrived just a year later, in 2019, with an even higher level of efficiency — the antenna was now redesigned so that its components were distributed in a single layer across one plate — and an even smaller case diameter of 40mm. The Astron, which had long been pigeonholed as a masculine watch simply due to its size, could now be executed in more feminine styles, as in the Ref. STXD009, with a mother-of-pearl dial and diamond hour markers. 

1969 Quartz Astron 50th Anniversary Limited Edition

That same year, of course, marked the Astron’s 50th birthday. Seiko celebrated the milestone with a special edition that, for lack of a better description, reimagined the 1969 original as if it had been made in the modern era, with access to 21st-Century Seiko’s cutting-edge GPS technology. Limited to just 50 pieces, its 40.9mm barrel-shaped case was made of gold, like the original’s, and featured a decorative hand-carved motif on its surface. Its movement, the Solar-powered, GPS-equipped Caliber 3X22, was the slimmest one yet to be installed in a watch case, allowing the watch to maintain a period-appropriate thickness of just over 12mm. Perhaps inevitably, this extremely limited, precious-metal-cased homage edition also replicated the car-equivalent price of its ancestor, about $35,000. In 2020 came another anniversary, what would have been the 160th birthday of Seiko founder Kintaro Hattori. Seiko released another special Astron GPS Solar edition (among several other tribute pieces) in commemoration, this time using black-coated, scratch-resistant titanium for the case and bracelet, zirconium ceramic for the bezel, and gold accents for the dial. The bezel’s 16 facets each represent a decade of Kintaro’s life.

Astron GPS Solar Kintaro Hattori 160th Anniversary Limited Edition

Even more recently, the Seiko brand celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2024 and marked the occasion with an all-new Astron movement, Caliber 5X83, the first Solar-powered GPS-equipped movement that combined a dual-time function with a chronograph. First introduced, here again, in a limited edition devoted to Kintaro Hattori, with a predominantly black case and yellow-gold details, the watch that carried the new quartz caliber was also introduced in non-limited versions with two-part ceramic/titanium bezels. The release of this new, more complicated version of the Astron sent a strong message to any remaining doubters, who may have dismissed the original GPS Solar Watch in 2012 as a trend, a gimmick, or a niche product with limited appeal: in contrast to its groundbreaking but short-lived 1969 predecessor, this Astron is its own distinct product family that is likely to be here for the foreseeable future, with seemingly endless capacity for expansion.

When the original Seiko Astron debuted in 1969 — a pivotal year for the watch industry in many respects, from the birth of quartz, to the debut of the first self-winding chronograph movements, to the Omega Speedmaster’s epochal journey to the moon — its now-famous promotional line, attributed to Shoji Hattori himself, was “Someday all watches will be made this way.” In hindsight, that prognostication has not proven entirely accurate, even for Seiko itself. But the technological revolution that the Seiko Astron heralded has continued apace in the 21st Century. The Astron opened the door not only for all of the affordable quartz watches you see today but also for innovations like GPS, radio-controlled atomic timekeeping, solar battery charging, Seiko’s own quartz/mechanical hybrid Spring Drive technology, and even the myriad functions of today’s smartwatches. More than half a century after the Astron’s Christmas Day debut, its importance in the annals of watchmaking is more evident than ever.