The now famous advertising slogan it takes a licking and keeps on ticking has helped make the Timex brand world famous as a producer of reliable and stylish watches that are also very affordable. Made popular during the nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties by television personality John Cameron Swayze, the innovative campaign took full advantage of television as an advertising medium adding impetus to the power of the demonstration.
Viewers were treated to a host of different scenarios which tested the capabilities of the Timex during what was often billed as a torture test. The watches were strapped onto the blades of outboard boat motors, dropped into the water from heights as far as sixteen hundred feet and shown on camera to still be running. The campaign was so successful that by the end of the nineteen fifties, Timex watches had become the most popular watch brand in the United States.
With sales over one billion watches since the watches were first introduced in nineteen fifty, no other watch manufacturer has matched the performance of Timex. The parent company of Timex was founded long before the first Timex was introduced, dating back to eighteen fifty four as the Waterbury Clock Company in Connecticut. The early watch market featured only pocket watches with wrist watches not becoming popular until the early nineteen hundreds.
Waterbury took advantage of the popularity of the wrist watch, introducing its first wrist watch models during World War One. Under a license granted by the Disney Company, Waterbury introduced the Mickey Mouse watch in nineteen thirty three which became an instant success and is prized by collectors even today.
The Timex watch brand has survived intense competition from other watch manufacturers and remains one of the most well known, most purchased watches on the market today.
Pulsar Watch History
Not from the Swiss but from an American manufacturer, the Pulsar helped to revolutionize how people felt about the humble wrist watch. Born out of the explosion microelectronics technology that occurred during the nineteen seventies, Pulsar quite literally changed the face of timekeeping.
Up until the nineteen seventies, the analog watch face dominated the design of wrist watches. Then in nineteen seventy two the Hamilton Watch Company introduced a watch that completely abandoned the traditional notions of the analog timepiece. Totally electronic and featuring digital time readout, the Pulsar was not immediately accepted by the public. The digital readout was made possible by the invention of the light emitting diode or LED.
A product of electronic miniaturization the LED can now be found in everything from automotive taillights and household appliances to spacecraft. The primary advantage of the LED is the ability to emit a relatively strong light stream while consuming far less power than any type of vacuum gas lighting.
The nineteen seventies were a time of great excitement and focus on the successful exploration of the moon and other space achievements. The name Pulsar was taken from an astrological term used to describe the intense bursts of radiation produced by collapsing neutron stars in deep space. Like a pulse of light, the face of the watch was visible in daylight conditions and consumers gradually warmed to the modern look of the Pulsar. Since the introduction of the first Pulsar, the look has shifted back to the more traditional analog face design combined with the reliability of an electronic quartz movement that has given the Pulsar a well-deserved reputation for accuracy.
Newer models of the Pulsar feature classic watch styling at a price that is very accessible to the average watch buyer, though the Pulsar has never comprised on accuracy and reliability.
