Digital watches
7. 3. – 6. 6. 2023

The exhibition, entitled Digital watches, will present to the public a collection of 264 pieces of wristwatches with electric and electronic movement, quartz (silicon) oscillator or controlled by remote signal and partly using a digital time indicator, produced between the 1950s and 1990s. This collection, which has been part of the museum’s Clock collection since 2020, is undoubtedly the most comprehensive and representative material documentation of the modern era of the development of the watch as an everyday object that has accompanied mankind in unprecedented numbers since the 1970s, at least in the Czech Republic.

The collection has been added to the collection of the Technical Museum in Brno thanks to the long-term cooperation with the passionate, dedicated and deeply erudite collector and watchmaking expert, engineer Libor Hovorka. The collection includes watches from the following countries: the USA, Germany (GDR and Germany), Czechoslovakia, USSR, Switzerland, Great Britain, Poland, Bulgaria, Japan, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong. Thanks to this, the visitors of the exhibition “Digital” can not only admire the individual exhibits, but also get an overview of the worldwide chronological development of this segment of wristwatches.

Did you know that the first digital watch with an LED dipole made its world premiere in 1971? It was a product of the American company Hamilton called Pulsar. Digital watches with LED display were then produced until the mid-1980s.

Photos from the exhibition, ©Technické muzeum v Brně