What is ticking inside a luxury watch, and why a battery nearly ended Swiss watchmaking.
By Shreya S · Last reviewed 15 November 2026
How does a mechanical watch work?
A coiled mainspring stores energy. It releases that energy through a train of gears, and an escapement and balance wheel let it out in tiny, even beats that move the hands. In a manual watch you wind the spring by the crown; in an automatic, a weighted rotor winds it as your wrist moves. No battery is involved.
And a quartz watch?
A battery sends current through a tiny quartz crystal, which vibrates at 32,768 times a second. A circuit counts the vibrations and drives a motor once a second. Quartz is far more accurate and cheaper than mechanical, which is why collectors value mechanical watches for craft rather than precision.
What was the quartz crisis?
Seiko launched the first quartz wristwatch, the Astron, in 1969. Through the 1970s cheap, accurate quartz watches from Japan swept the market and Swiss watchmaking collapsed, losing most of its jobs. The rescue came from the plastic, inexpensive Swatch of 1983 and the merger of struggling brands into what became the Swatch Group under Nicolas Hayek. Swiss brands then repositioned mechanical watches as luxury objects.
What is a complication?
Any function beyond hours, minutes and seconds. Simple ones include the date and a chronograph (stopwatch). Grand complications include the perpetual calendar, which knows leap years; the minute repeater, which chimes the time; and the tourbillon, a rotating cage patented by Abraham-Louis Breguet in 1801 to even out the effect of gravity. The more complications, the higher the price.
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