More on Kikuo Ibe and the Invention of the G-Shock (and my old GD-350)

Saturday, 06 July 2019

More on Kikuo Ibe and the Invention of the G-Shock (and my old GD-350)

I shuffled around in my drawers looking for one of my older G-Shocks.

Unfortunately I didn't keep any of my 1980s Casio watches (although I still have my 1970s calculator) and not even my 1990s G-Shocks.

I did find the fully digital GD-350 which I think I was wearing about six years ago. The fact that I could use this watch without my glasses shows how much my eyesight has deteriorated.

The watch has the signs of lots of wear but battery still running and only lost a few minutes time after years at the bottom of the drawer.

Finding this 'older' watch has inspired me to post some more about Casio's legendary Kikuo Ibe and the invention of the G-Shock watch.

From Jack Forster at Hodinkee:

Mr. Kikuo Ibe never expected to be world famous, but famous he is: he's the man who invented the Casio G-Shock. At first, he hardly seems like the sort of person who could develop the world's toughest watch. He's slightly built, slim, soft-spoken, and bespectacled, which seems a little incongruous until you remember that G-Shock is as much an engineering achievement as a horological one, and Mr. Ibe is very much an engineer.

The history of the G-Shock is full of interesting stories (as you'd expect of a family of watches designed to tolerate just about any sort of abuse imaginable) and in a recent conversation with Ibe, at Casio's offices in New York, I had a chance to dig back a bit into those stories and to find out what's apocryphal, what's legend, and what's true. Many of the highlights in the story of G-Shock are familiar to hardcore G-Shock fans (and yes, there is a worldwide community of G-Shock collectors as serious about their watches as any gaggle of vintage Patek or Rolex collectors), but hearing them from the man who started it all over 30 years ago is a reminder of how much persistence it took to bring G-Shock to life.

First of all, yes, it's absolutely true that Ibe got the idea for G-Shock after a beloved mechanical watch broke. The watch was a gift from his father, and one day, while walking down the street (he'd been with Casio for several years already when the accident happened) another pedestrian bumped into him hard enough to break the band of his watch and knock it to the pavement (Ibe says he tried to catch it, but missed). The watch broke in pretty much every way a watch can break: the hands were dislodged, the caseback came off, and the band broke. What Ibe won't tell, however, is what brand and model watch it was. He says he's been asked many times, but prefers not to say, beyond acknowledging that it was mechanical, a Japanese-made domestic model, and not a Casio.

The testing process didn't really get off the ground until Ibe, seeing a girl bouncing a ball in a playground, got the idea of putting the movement inside a resilient structure that would isolate it from shocks. It's also absolutely true that the prototypes were tested by being thrown out of an upper floor bathroom window at Casio's research and development center: specifically, the third floor men's room window. The distance to the pavement below was ten meters, and Ibe's goal was to make a watch capable of surviving a ten meter fall, with a ten year battery life, and ten bar (100 meter) water resistance. The very first G-Shock model, DW-5000, came out in 1983, with 200m water resistance and, needless to say, the ability to survive a ten meter fall. Ibe says he tested the production prototypes in every way he could think of, including running them over with a car.

Ibe began working on prototypes for a shock-proof watch in 1981. At the time, he says, the main goal in quartz watchmaking was to make very thin watches, so he started by trying to make housings for LCD quartz movements that would allow them to tolerate severe impacts. In 1982 he'd made enough progress for the development of G-Shock to become an official Casio project, with eight engineers assigned. The initial prototypes were proof-of-concept models and not especially wearable.

The original prototypes are now the rarest G-Shocks of all.

Back to the 2013 G-Shock GD-350.

I notice it was famous for its super precise countdown function and the vibration alarm. Not something I used liked many of the other functionalities. But just having it there makes you feel good!