Once upon an o'clock I was quite anti-quartz. They have no soul.
Obviously, no watch has a soul. Arguably people don't either, what I mean is that quartz watches have no personality. They are the John Majors of wrist worn horology. They just do the job they are given in an utterly unexciting manner. They woudn't for example, hold an illicit party, or give away the Chagos islands (then agree to pay a small fortune to rent them back) whilst you back was turned.
Quartz is dull. Quartz's idea of living dangerously would be to seduce Edwina Currie.
<<shudder>>
So I concentrated my collecting on the mechanical.
And then I came across the combination of Richard Arbib's cases and the Hamilton 500 series.
For those that don't know Richard Arbib's designs were a sublime slice 50's futuristic folly and the 500 was the worlds first electric watch. Electric, not electronic. The latter uses transistors, the former is just switches and electro-magnets.
If the inaccuracies of a mechanical watch give that watch a soul. Then Hamilton collected souls and poured them into the 500. Positional variations, iso-chronism, temperature variations and, let's face it, the fact the 500 is so unreliable give these watches more charactor than you'd want. The 500 is more unpredicatble than the bastard child of Trump and Truss.
From a rather lovely, but reliably unreliable Sealectric, I quickly graduated to a ESA9162 Omega. These watches use a tuning fork as their mechanical delay. But vibrating at 300Hz, a mechanical switch was no longer sufficient to control the electro-magnet that wibbles the tuning fork. A transistor replaces the 500's switch and the movement is now electronic.
I still had a thing against soul-less quartz.
More tuning fork watches were acquired. Mostly 916x base Omegas, but I couldn't resist a Bulova with a 214. It's inferior to the 916x in many ways. The 916x's tuning fork has counter weights to cancel out the 7-ish seconds per day of positional error that you can get with the 214. The only quantifiable way that the 214 is better is that you can see the gubbins through it's Spaceview case.
And then I had a bit of an "Oh my!" moment. I came across the Omega Electroquartz. Part tuning fork, part quartz, part eye-watering repair bill waiting to happen. The second hand of this movment has the characteristic super smooth sweep of a tuing fork watch, as the drive motor is pure tuning fork technology. Except that the vibrating element is just a torsion bar, not a tuned fork designed to ring at 300hz. Instead a quartz crystal and primitive I.C. drive the torsion bar at 256Hz.
It was my first special and cherished vintage quartz watch.
Next came a Omega Seamaster Mariner (196.0054) with a Omega 1310 inside. This watch has the jerky second hand of quratz watches that grates against the nerves. But in it's defence the 1310 is bonkers. See here for the user manual:
http://www.old-omegas.com/1310-2en.html , I've never come across another movement like it. How they could make the setting of a simple three hander so complicated I will never understand. I love that 70's madness.
So then I had two vintage quartz watches. In a separate search for something a bit different to by I was looking at Grand Seikos. They were out of my price range. "I know, I'll try buying direct from Japan."
And then I had three vintage quartz. GS was still more than I wanted to spend. But I'd discovered the Seiko Grand Quartz. In their day, GQ were more expensive than GS. My 1978 GQ has a 9943 movement. Thermally compensated to be accurate to +/-10 seconds per year. 10s per year in 1978! Yes, it's got the grating jumpy second hand, but that movement is a seriously impressive piece of horology and I love it for that. Well OK, that and the way it looks.
Not sure what's next for me. I don't have another quartz watch in my sights, but who knows...