Wristwatch enthusiasts can be persnickety. They often have strong opinions about whether bezels should be bidirectional. They can cite the differences between ETA and Sellita movements. They will happily preach the gospel of microadjust clasps and guilloche dials.

And for years — decades, really — they formed a fairly unified front when it came to their contempt for quartz watches. Unlike mechanical timepieces, which are like Rube Goldberg machines in miniature, quartz watches are essentially powered by an electronic circuit. To purists, this felt like cheating.

Scientists have long speculated about the origin of the Ordovician meteor event, when Earth was bombarded by space rocks at an unusually high rate, producing dozens of craters and sediments packed with meteorites. Previous research implicated a large asteroid that broke apart in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter and sent rocky shrapnel into the inner solar system, where it pelted our planet.

“There was this idea that quartz was somehow diametrically opposed to the nobility of mechanical Swiss watchmaking,” said Andrew McUtchen, the founder of Time & Tide Watches, an online publication based in Australia. “But time has healed some of those wounds — pardon the pun.”

No longer carrying as much of a stigma, quartz has found an audience among collectors who, until recently, never could have fathomed slapping anything other than mechanical watches onto their wrists. But thanks to a growing emphasis on design and technological advancement, many brands — big and small — are pushing quartz forward.

Grand Seiko, for example, has an exceptional quartz movement known as the Caliber 9F. Citizen has the light-powered Caliber 0100, which the company says is accurate to within one second a year. And TAG Heuer has the Aquaracer Solargraph, a popular model that was first released in 2022. The brand recently released a limited-edition iteration in collaboration with Time & Tide. Priced at more than $3,000 each, all 250 pieces sold out within 24 hours.

ImageTAG Heuer first introduced the Aquaracer Solargraph in 2022.Credit...TAG Heuer

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.ssbet77