The first wrist-worn timepiece to
tell the time digitally was the Hamilton Watch Company’s “Pulsar”. This 18-carat-gold cased device used a red
LED display to tell the user what time it was in clean, crisp, twentieth
century digits at the push of a simple button and retailed for a cool
$2100. Teething problems meant the
Pulsar did not become commercially available until 1972, but when it was
released, it caused many to think that the end had come for conventional dial
face watches with mechanical movements.
Hamilton claimed that their inspiration for developing a digital watch
was the futuristic digital clock that they had created for the 1968 film 2001:A
space Odyssey.
The only problem with the Pulsar
was the hefty accompanying price tag-although many would argue that $2100 was
cheap for the opportunity to look like James Bond wearing a swanky gold digital
watch. The answer for those who did not
want to pay so much for a watch came from Texas Instruments, who introduced a
plastic-strapped version that retailed for just $20 in 1975 and soon after
dropped to $10. This spelled the end for
Hamilton and led to them becoming a subsidiary of Seiko.
Developments in digital watches
continued over the next three decades and included the use of liquid crystal
displays to replace light-emitting diodes (which could not always be left on
due to their high level of power consumption) in the early 1970s. Throughout the 1980s many amazing innovations
were incorporated into the digital display, including thermometers, language
translators, calculators and even miniature televisions.
