Meca-Quartz Movements, Explained

Everybody knows the story by now: During the 1970s, with the battery-powered quartz movement on the rise, inexpensive, Japanese-made timepieces flooded the market, resulting in enormous layoffs and the near disappearance of mechanical watchmaking. Indeed, the number of Swiss watchmaking maisons shrank from roughly 1,600 to just 600.

Some brands stuck to their guns, foreseeing, perhaps, that there would always be a place for a movement that required only gravity and a bit of lubrication to work — or, perhaps, anticipating a time when a resurgence in interest would result in a new golden era of mechanical watchmaking. Both suppositions, of course, turned out to be true, and these days, mechanical watches have penetrated the zeitgeist like never before.

There’s still a place for quartz movements, millions upon millions of which are sold each year. For the enthusiast, interest in quartz is generally low. (Batteries aren’t nearly as fascinating to the watch nerd as the kinetic energy of a coiled spring, it would seem.) But there’s a special type of quartz caliber that does indeed seem to pique this person’s interest: the meca-quartz movement.