Description
Black and white 10″ x 13 1/2″ ad for the Accutron Wristwatch. The headline asks “Accutron: If it isn’t a watch, what is it?” and, just below this, it has one ticking away. The text claims that “It looks like a watch. And it keeps time. (Which is what watches are for.) But all the things that make a fine watch tick have been left out of it. (They happen to be the same things that make a fine watch wrong. The balance wheel, springs, the whole works.) The Accutron movement keeps time with a tuning fork. And the time it keeps is so precise that it divides every second into 360 equal parts. (A regular watch only divides a second into 5 parts.) All of which is why we offer the first specific guarantee ever given for the time you’ll keep. We guarantee monthly accuracy within 60 seconds – which averages out to about 2 seconds a day. A fine conventional watch cannot even be regulated to lose or gain only 2 seconds (much less maintain it). So you can see why the U.S. has turned to Accutron movements for satellites and has issued them to all X-15 pilots. As an Accutron owner, of course, you may wonder if it wouldn’t be all right if you called this timepiece a watch among your friends, just for convenience’s sake. No.”.
Source: November 27, 1964 Life magazine.
