Fifty Watches That Changed the World: Design Museum Fifty by Alex Newson

Author:Alex Newson [Newson, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781840916980
Publisher: Octopus
Published: 2015-09-06T16:00:00+00:00

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SEIKO ‘VOICE NOTE’ 1983 Actor Harold Ramis seen wearing the Seiko ‘Voice Note’ in Ghostbusters. Along with the cutting-edge recording technology, another innovation was the watchcase, made using a ground-breaking composite of steel and carbon fibre. Popularized after appearing in the 1984 film Ghostbusters, the ‘Voice Note’ allowed the wearer to record and playback short voice messages. It had the capacity to record just two messages at a time, and allowed a maximum combined recording length of 12 seconds. The ‘Voice Note’ is a revealing example of the explosion of new digital watch features that were developed in the 1980s.

It is easy to dismiss these models as something of a joke today, but the functionality in many of these watches has continued to evolve and can be seen in some of the smartphone and smartwatch apps that we now take for granted. Moore’s law – a pattern noticed and described by the founder of the Intel Corporation in 1965 – states that the number of transistors in a microchip roughly doubles every 18 months. Crudely put, this means that computing and electronic processing power is doubling in speed and capacity every year and a half. Since its discovery, Moore’s law has proven remarkably accurate, helping to explain why the pace of technological change appears to be getting faster and faster. At the time of its launch, the ‘Voice Note’ was using the most advanced technology possible.

Applying the basic principle of Moore’s law to the digital watch, today’s equivalent of the ‘Voice Note’ would be over a million times more powerful.

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