Time’s New Face: Liquid Crystals In Your Wristwatch

In 1970 two small start-up companies—Optel, near Princeton, New Jersey, and James Fergason’s Ilixco, in Kent, Ohio—decided to gamble on making liquidcrystal displays a reality. Two years later both were ready for something completely new: the digital wristwatch. False starts and missteps had bedeviled them, but they had paved the way not just for watch displays but for LCDs of all sorts.

Optel began in early 1970, after a restless RCA employee named Zoltan Kiss had made his way through the company’s labs the previous year looking for potential colleagues for his own business. He didn’t even have a particular product in mind, but he recruited a staff and put almost everyone to work on his own research project. Only a couple of technicians worked on liquid crystals, but that effort flourished by drawing on fundamental research that had been done at RCA.

There a physicist named George Heilmeier had demonstrated the potential for liquidcrystal displays back in 1964. RCA’s management had supported his work for a while, hoping it might be the answer to the dream the company’s chairman, David Sarnoff, had of a flat-panel TV that could hang on a wall. Heilmeier put together a team that made new discoveries almost daily, synthesizing a material that worked at room temperature and observing the dynamic scattering effect, in which liquid crystals scattered and reflected ambient light to show up as milky gray characters over a dark, mirrored background.

But Heilmeier and his team had faced numerous obstacles. Although management was supportive, some product-development people saw liquid crystals as easily concocted by any competitor, while others predicted insurmountable sealing and packaging problems or the lack of a market. So in 1970 Heilmeier left RCA in frustration and took a job in the government.

Optel’s liquid-crystal group presented the dynamic scattering effect at an electronics trade show in Houston in the summer of 1970 and met with a spectacular reception. Then they put together a digital-display prototype small enough for a wristwatch, to demonstrate that it could be easily manufactured. The liquid crystals were contained in cells to form the seven-segment digits familiar today, indicating hours and minutes, with a flashing colon for the seconds. Kiss immediately sought backing from watch manufacturers, and he got it from both Bulova in the United States and SSIH in Switzerland, the company that made Omega and Tissot watches.

The watch industry was in turmoil at the time. Electronic components and vibrating quartz crystals were beginning to replace gears and balance wheels, and in 1970 Hamilton announced the world’s first electronic digital watch, the Pulsar, with no hands or dial but rather a bright-red light-emitting-diode display. It went on sale in 1972. But it was so power-hungry it couldn’t shine continuously; the user had to push a button to see the time. And it cost $2,100, as much as a small car.

James Fergason first saw the Pulsar not long after he founded Ilixco (see main text). He real- ized that the energy efficiency of his twisted-nematic technology (which was superior to that of Optel’s dynamic-scattering method) would make it especially suitable for watches, and he performed his attention-getting demonstration in Cleveland in 1971. Soon Ilixco had contracts for watch displays too.

Both start-ups had a hard time. Bulova signed development contracts with both Ilixco and Optel but failed to pursue the projects past the prototype stage. Ilixco and Optel both accepted huge orders only to find that they couldn’t meet their deadlines as they faced problems with moisture contaminating the liquid crystals and with the suppliers of other components for the watches.

Nonetheless, LCD watches soon hit the stores. Optel promised its biggest customer, Waltham, displays for 25,000 watches for the 1972 Christmas season but could deliver only 2,000. Ilixco filled its first orders for Gruen in 1973 and went on to produce others for Timex and Seiko.

Then companies like Fairchild and Motorola moved in, and within a few years nearly 50 other outfits flooded the market with digital watches. Quality suffered while prices plunged, and consumers returned faulty watches in record numbers. To get decent contrast, you had to hold a watch at just the right angle; you couldn’t tell time in the dark; many of the watches were plain ugly. The glut forced new companies to pull out almost as quickly as they had gotten in. Most went out of business entirely.

As American manufacturers retrenched, Japanese firms stepped in. They sent representatives to learn from American companies. Foreseeing a future full of portable electronic devices needing low-power displays, businesses including Seiko, Sharp, Hitachi, and NEC committed to improving LCDs and producing a host of new products. Their success was sealed in 1983 when Seiko introduced the world’s first LCD television wristwatch (with a receiver in the user’s pocket). Its tiny screen was a giant step toward Sarnoff’s dream of a TV on the wall.