Mechanical Watches Almost Disappeared Forever. Here’s How They Didn’t

Originally published by Joe Thompson in two parts on Hodinkee.

In 1976, with the watch world agog over LEDs, LCDs and quartz analogs, George Daniels, the world’s greatest living watchmaker, was fed up. “I was furious with ‘electricians,’” he told Norma Buchanan, my colleague on American Time magazine, in 1999. “Electricians” was Daniels’s disdainful term for proponents of electronic watches, as well as the electric watch which was its forerunner. “I was angry with the way they just strode through the watch world saying, ‘This is the future.’”