Word: watching
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Their own engineers did not let the watchmakers down. The first quartz-based wristwatch was produced in Neuchatel in 1967, and Switzerland's chemical industry led in developing the liquid crystal displays used in many digital watches. But U.S. manufacturers got a technological lead, using miniaturization techniques largely developed for the space program, and began mass production that sent prices tumbling. Texas Instruments recently announced that it will market a digital watch for $20. Swiss watchmakers had held back, believing digital timepieces would be only...
...There were people in Switzerland who thought one could never do away with the hands on a watch," admits Georges-Adrien Matthey, director general of Société Suisse pour l'Industrie Horlogère S.A. (S.S.I.H.), which makes Omega and Tissot watches. Result: of the more than 4 million digital watches produced in the world last year, fewer than 500,000 were made in Switzerland...
Even such advances cannot solve the social problems that have resulted from the watch industry's decline. To a large extent, watchmaking has remained a cottage industry, with production divided among more than 1,000 firms scattered throughout the foothills of the French-speaking Jura region. Unemployment among the workers has inevitably affected Switzerland's normally strike-free labor relations. In January, 189 workers at a U.S.-owned Bulova plant in Neuchátel went on strike to oppose plans for consolidating production in Bienne, 20 miles down the road...
Even if business picks up, the prospects are grim. The average electronic watch requires only half as much labor as a mechanical watch, and present watchmaking skills, maintained through generations, are sometimes not transferable. Only time can tell whether or not the Swiss industry's belated push to go electronic can prevent the disappearance of a way of life...
...gallery of silly asses of the English upper class, alas unrelieved by a Jeeves. "They were quite good, but just things for laughter," Travers recalls. By the '50s, this collection of emotional still lifes seemed too pallid for the English stage, so Travers retired to the seaside to watch cricket. But when he was well into his 80s he decided to try again, and succeeded in broadening his vision and style without losing his comic bite, a feat that eluded even Bernard Shaw in his declining years...