Feature: Why These Brands Have NEVER Made A Quartz Watch
There was a time when the life support machine keeping mechanical wristwatches alive was on the verge of being switched off for good. Quartz was the future, people were off-loading their wind-up tickers like a used face-mask during the covid pandemic and long-established manufacturers were scrambling to adapt to the new reality.
One prominent company even ordered its workers to scrap the old machines used for making the most famous chronograph movement ever invented (looking at you, Zenith).
Brands had to change or die. So you’d think that every single one of the big-name watchmakers around today with a history going back decades, if not centuries, would have at least a few quartz models in their back catalogue.
But no. While some brands embraced quartz and a few, such as Rolex, made lukewarm overtures to the technology, others, to this day, can truthfully state that a quartz battery has never powered a single model in their entire history.
Let’s look at three of these brands and find out why.
Panerai
From 1938 to 1994 Panerai was an oddly intermittent sort of company. During that entire period it only manufactured around 350 watches for the divers of the Italian military, meaning genuine vintage models are extremely rare. After World War II its best-known models, the Luminor and Radiomir, went pretty much unchanged all the way through to 1993 when it finally began catering for the civilian market—albeit in limited numbers.
No battery has ever powered a Panerai, though it did rely on external movement makers for most of is history
Though the 1970s was a barren time for Panerai, this was less due to the quartz crisis than the fact that the lucrative military contracts on which it had once relied had dried up, what with that decade being relatively peaceful—for Europe at least.
Panerai, then, was far too small-scale an operation to bother with buying quartz movements in bulk, and so it continued to outsource mechanical ones in tiny numbers. By the time Panerai was rebooted in 1993 the quartz crisis was over and the brand picked up where it left off, making solely mechanical watches and launching its first in-house movement in 2005.
Blancpain
“There has never been a quartz Blancpain watch and there never will be,” said a defiant Jean-Claude Biver when he and Jacques Piguet purchased the dormant brand in 1982 for the paltry sum of $16,000. Ten years previously, Blancpain, the world’s oldest watchmaker, had been seemingly killed off forever by quartz, and even when Biver resurrected it, the outlook for mechanical watches was far from rosy. Quartz was still very much king at the dawn of the 1980s.
Former Blancpain owner Jean-Claude Biver vowed the brand would never use quartz
Biver, however, was confident that there would always be a market for mechanical watches and his outright rejection of quartz—viewed as arrogant madness by some—became one of Blancpain’s USPs. Not only that, Biver was adamant that Blancpain should focus on high-end complications made the traditional way, including minute repeaters, moonphases and perpetual calendars. Blancpain, now in the hands of the Swatch Group who bought it in 1992, celebrated the 40th anniversary of its revival in 2022 and, true to Biver’s word, not a single quartz watch has darkened its doors.
A Lange & Söhne
Imagine looking through the caseback of an A. Lange & Sohne watch and finding a quartz battery staring up at you instead of the lavishly engraved bridges and balance cocks of a mechanical movement. It’s a shudder-inducing scenario. Yet it’s one that could have been very real had the aftermath of World War II taken a slightly different turn and the Russians hadn’t effectively put the brand into a coma by confiscating its machinery.
Digital, yes, but definitely not quartz. A.Lange & Sohne is all about hand-engraved mechanical movements
Like the fictional Rip Van Winkle who slept for twenty years and missed the American Revolution, Lange’s 45-year dormancy meant it evaded the horological horrors of the quartz crisis, emerging in 1990 into a world where mechanical watches were once again in the ascendancy. New-generation Lange models have always featured hand-finished manual-wind or self-winding movements that are works of arts in themselves, and all other Glashütte brands have followed Lange’s lead in staying mechanical.
That said, if Lange ever did decide to make a quartz model—about as likely as Lamborghini making laptops—it would probably be a masterpiece a la F.P. Journe’s quartz Eléganté, a watch that proved battery-powered can indeed be beautiful.
