Two hundred prototypes and a bathroom window

I opened the app looking for something else and ran into this: the Casio G-Shock is the only watch in my main list with zero wears in the last thirty days. The other fifteen all came out at least once. It did not.

Which is funny, because it is the one watch that needs the least care. It is the only one I could drop on a car park floor and feel nothing but embarrassment.

1981

The story starts with a Casio engineer named Kikuo Ibe, who in 1981 filed an internal proposal: build a wristwatch that does not break. Easy to state. Hard to do, because a wristwatch is a delicate instrument strapped to the part of the body that hits things most.

The development team set a target that became known as Triple 10: survive a ten-metre free fall, withstand ten bars of water pressure, and run ten years on a battery.

A third-floor window

There was no drop-test lab. The method was Ibe climbing to the third floor, opening the bathroom window, and letting the prototype fall onto the pavement below. Then walking down to see what was left.

The first year produced more than a hundred test models. None passed. The approach was the obvious one: reinforce, armour, pack protection around the movement. The more material went around it, the more rigid the whole thing became, and the more of the impact arrived intact at the part that mattered.

Children in a park

The breakthrough did not come at a drawing board. Ibe was in a park, watched children playing with a ball, and noticed that the centre of the ball barely moves when the ball hits the ground. The rubber absorbs everything around it.

The answer was to stop armouring the module and start suspending it inside the case on a few contact points, touching no wall. The impact becomes the case's problem. The module swings and keeps running.

He had been solving the wrong problem: not protecting the mechanism, but disconnecting it from the blow.

Two years and more than two hundred prototypes later, the project became a product.

April 1983

The DW-5000C-1A reached shops in April 1983 at ¥11,400. In Japan interest was lukewarm. A thick, square, digital watch sold on the promise of taking a beating was not quite what the Japanese market was asking for at the time.

The Americans bought the idea. In 1984 a US television commercial used the watch in place of an ice hockey puck and had it struck with a stick. The demonstration did for the product what no spec sheet would, and the G-Shock became a skater's and a surfer's watch well before it became a collector's subject.

Why mine is a 5600

In 1987 Casio released the DW-5600 with the same square silhouette as the first one. It has never been discontinued. The module changed several times, the lighting changed, the resin changed, the price changed. The shape has been the same for nearly forty years.

That is why it is the G-Shock collectors buy. It is not the most capable or the toughest the brand makes today; it is the one that preserves the original drawing of a project that almost did not happen.

What my log says

Five point four per cent of my rotation, and zero wears in the last thirty days. It is not forgotten: 5.4% across twenty-seven watches is real use, and it has had better months. But right now it is sitting still, and it is the only one sitting still.

The honest explanation is that I have an office life. The watch built to survive the world is the one that meets the least world in my week. It was not designed for my kind of day, and that is not its fault.

This is what logging wear is for. Without the log I would say I wear the G-Shock now and then, and go on believing it. With the log I know the number, and the number forces a decision: either I find occasions for it, or I admit it is an object of affection rather than a tool in my routine.

I have not decided yet.