War of the Gems: When Watch Brands Outbid Each Other with Rubies

The Jewel Wars

How an honest quality feature became a marketing arms race – and why Japanese brands, of all companies, rolled out the most spectacular weapons

Anyone who collects Japanese vintage watches knows the moment: you turn a dial from the 1960s into the light and read, just above or below the six, a proud number – "30 Jewels", "39 Jewels", and on some pieces even "100 Jewels". More than double or triple what a watch actually needs. What's behind it? The answer is one of the most curious episodes in watch history: the Jewel Wars, that arms race of the 1950s and 1960s, in which manufacturers tried to outdo each other with increasingly absurd jewel counts. And right at the center of this battle – with particular ambition – were Seiko, Citizen, and Orient.

 
What jewel bearings are really for

To understand when a high jewel count becomes pure show, one must first know what a jewel actually does in a watch movement. The "jewels" of a mechanical watch are almost always synthetic rubies today. They are located where tiny steel pivots must run with as little friction, wear, and as much precision as possible – especially at the bearing points of the gear train, the escapement, and the balance wheel. A movement whose relevant bearing points are all fitted with rubies is called "fully jeweled."

Instead of running directly in a brass bushing – which wears out over time – the pivot rotates in a finely polished ruby hole on an extremely hard surface. This reduces wear, keeps the bearing geometry stable, and maintains accuracy.

Particularly sensitive areas are double-secured: On the balance staff, a flat cap jewel complements the hole jewel to form a "capped" bearing – the hole jewel guides the pivot laterally, the cap jewel holds it axially and keeps the oil in place. The two pallet stones and the impulse pin in the escapement also perform real work.

Until around 1900, these jewels were cut from real rubies and sapphires – expensive, which is why they were only used in the most important places. With the Verneuil process, synthetic rubies became cheap from about 1902; technically, almost every bearing could have been jeweled then. But the sensible need remained limited: Seven jewels are the absolute minimum; in classic hand-wound movements, 15 to 17 jewels were long considered technically fully "jeweled" (the complete gear train, the escapement, the capped balance). An automatic movement justifies about 25 jewels with its rotor and winding mechanism, and real complications correspondingly more. Beyond that, however, every additional jewel brings the wearer – nothing. This is where the story begins.

How a number became a selling point

At the beginning of the 20th century, watch movements were so technically standardized that manufactures hardly differed – except in manufacturing quality. Customers lacked a catchy criterion. And so the industry seized upon the one number that was already on the dial: the jewel count. "More jewels = better watch" – this equation became entrenched in people's minds, and from then on, the stage was set. For what began as an honest quality signal became a gateway for marketing: If the market confuses more jewels with more value, then you simply give the market more jewels.

In the 1950s and 1960s, this "jewel craze" escalated into the

grotesque. Suddenly, watches with 41, 53, 75, and finally over 100 jewels circulated. The most notorious case comes from the USA: The Waltham with "100 Jewels" possessed a perfectly ordinary 17-jewel movement, to which 83 additional rubies were added around the rotor's oscillating weight – functionally completely senseless, pure dial decoration. Benrus also released a 100-jewel model. The jewels were sometimes simply glued somewhere onto the mainplate to meet the quota; there were even pieces that lacked the full 17 basic bearing jewels but still bore a high number on the dial.

How Japan took the Jewel Wars to the extreme

While the Swiss industry played the game rather reluctantly and the Americans played it most brazenly, the arms race in Japan found the most fertile ground imaginable. The post-war industry caught up at a breathtaking pace, three major houses – Seiko, Citizen, and Orient – engaged in a bitter domestic market battle, and the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo gave additional impetus to national ambition. The jewel count became the battlefield on which the rank and prestige of a model could be read.

Seiko: the Seikomatic and the art of dummy jewels

Seiko's ascent to the automatic upper class began in 1959 with the Gyro Marvel, the first entirely in-house automatic movement. From this emerged the Seikomatic family, and on it, the jewel hierarchy

of the early 1960s can be exemplary: The calendarlss base movement 603 was available with 17, 20, and – as a gold-plated luxury variant – 30 jewels; above that ranked the 24-jewel Self-Dater (394/6205), the 33-jewel Weekdater (400/6206), and at the top, the 39-jewel Caliber 395. A "39 Jewels" Seikomatic was the flagship – a piece that, as one collector once dryly remarked, "drove the Swiss to despair," and which appeared only a few years before the Quartz Astron, which would revolutionize the entire industry.

But where are these 39 jewels located? This is where it gets instructive. If you count precisely on the 395 movement, you will find nine blind dummy jewels under the calendar wheel, which bear nothing, as well as six spherical rubies in the winding mechanism. Subtracting these fifteen leaves 24 functional jewels – exactly as many as in the simpler 24-jewel model. The famous 39 was therefore about one-third cosmetic. This is, soberly considered, theater. To be fair: Not every high Seiko number was a misrepresentation. The 35-jewel 6218, for example, actually offered better features and not just filled-in calendar jewels. And the three-hand Grand Seikos of that era, with their 35 jewels, bore a number that matched their claim.

Citizen: "as expensive as a Rolex"

Citizen followed suit. The Jet series, introduced in 1962, and especially the "Super" models, formed the spearhead, because in Citizen, the prefix "Super" simultaneously signaled both: higher jeweling and finer regulation. In 1963, the Super Jet appeared as an automatic without a date with 35 jewels (caliber 0340/0341); in the same year, the Super Jet Auto Dater with 39 jewels (caliber 1150) – the highest-class watches Citizen built at the time. Contemporaries report that they cost as much as a Rolex. Alongside them were the highly regulated Deluxe and Super-Deluxe models (23–25 jewels), the Seven-Star series (21/23/25 jewels), and the Crystal Seven with 33 jewels. The market read these numbers like rankings – and that's exactly how they were intended.

Orient: the Japanese champion with 100 jewels

But Orient took the cake – literally worldwide. If the Jewel Wars knew two champions, they were the American Waltham with its 100 jewels and a Japanese counterpart: the Orient Grand Prix. In 1963, Orient released the Grand Prix Almighty 64 with 64 jewels, whose name alluded to the upcoming 1964 Olympic Games. A year later, the monument followed: the Grand Prix 100 with no less than 100 jewels.

It's remarkable that this watch was not a pure bluff. Inside was surprisingly serious – and thoroughly Swiss-inspired – technology: a Pellaton winding system based on the IWC model, a Triostat fine-regulating mechanism that enabled chronometer accuracy, and an Incabloc shock protection system; the case was made of 14-karat white gold double. The 100 jewels themselves – 89 rubies and eleven sapphires – were mostly located in the rotor and on the outer edge of the movement – officially to prevent "rotor grinding" on the plates, but in truth, to reach the magic number. After Orient had scaled this peak of the jewel race, the company changed its discipline and henceforth chased records in thinness: In 1967, the only 3.9 mm thin caliber 3900 (with 35 jewels) appeared, narrowly undercutting Citizen's 3.98 mm movement.

Ricoh: 45 jewels that actually bear

And then there's the most fascinating outsider of this story – incidentally, the piece that first got me interested in the topic. Besides the big three, a fourth player was involved, whom hardly anyone remembers today: Ricoh, known worldwide as an office machine and camera conglomerate, which entered the watch business through the acquisition of Takano Seimitsu Kogyo (Takano). After this acquisition, the Dynamic Auto became the company's top automatic line; its first model appeared in October 1962.

Its most prestigious statement was the Dynamic Auto "45 Jewels" – and it shows that the Jewel Wars not only produced misrepresentation but occasionally also honest engineering. Ricoh added an additional twelve-jewel ruby ball bearing to the rotor axle to the solid 33-jewel base caliber 54710, creating the caliber 54722. Unlike the glued-on ornamental pearls of some competitors, this ball bearing is a genuine, functioning component: It ensures a particularly smooth, cleanly running automatic winding. The "45 Jewels" on the dial are therefore not a bluff, but are actually installed and technically comprehensible – and in 1962/63, no other Japanese manufacturer could offer this number. Where Orient aimed for the magical hundred with predominantly decorative jewels, Ricoh earned its rank with jewels that actually provided bearings. This small, subtle point makes the Dynamic Auto so appealing to collectors today – and it is the best antidote to the suspicion that every high number in that decade was a lie.

How to spot bluff jewels at a glance

This names the pattern of the entire war. The honest jewels bear something; the dishonest ones fill a number. Three tricks recur again and again: blind dummy jewels under calendar and date mechanisms that bear nothing; superfluous cap jewels in places that do not require capping; and – the supreme discipline – entire batteries of rubies around the oscillating weight of an automatic rotor, which were sold as "friction-reducing," although they neither improve winding nor extend longevity. The rule of thumb still applies today: For a hand-wound watch, the useful jewels end at about 23, for a simple automatic at around 25. Everything above that is only justified by real complications – or is marketing.

 

Overview of the mentioned models

Brand	Model	Jewels	Type of jewels
Seiko	Seikomatic 395 / 6216	39	approx. 24 functional, rest dummy jewels
Citizen	Super Jet Auto Dater	39	Top model, higher regulated; mixed
Orient	Grand Prix 100	100	89 rubies + 11 sapphires, mostly decorative
Ricoh	Dynamic Auto “45 Jewels”	45	almost all functional (33 + 12 ball bearings)
Waltham	De Luxe Rollmatic	100	17 functional + 83 decorative

 

The US Market and the Magic 17-Jewel Mark

Another, often overlooked factor was the US market. There, the number 17 was not only technically but also economically significant. For classic manual-wind movements, a movement with 15 to 17 jewels was already considered "fully jeweled": the gear train, escapement, and balance wheel were equipped with jewel bearings at the critical friction points. While more jewels could be useful in certain constructions, they were often not a compelling technical advance for simple three-hand movements.

Especially for export watches to the USA, the American tariff system differentiated between movements with up to 17 jewels and those with more than 17 jewels. For movements with more than 17 jewels, an increased specific duty applied (in the older tariff system, around 10.75 USD per movement). The specific rates were adjusted several times over time – raised in 1954, lowered in 1967, and halved by 1972 as part of GATT – but the 17-jewel criterion itself remained.

This explains why some manufacturers offered special 17-jewel versions for the American market, although technically similar or almost identical movements for other markets were supplied with more jewels. The same logic is seen in a well-documented parallel case: because the Smoot-Hawley tariff significantly raised rates on adjusted movements, many manufacturers simply stamped their movements en masse as "Unadjusted." The 17-jewel limit was therefore not merely a watchmaking convention, but also a customs economic threshold: exceeding it risked higher import costs and thus a competitive disadvantage in the important US market.

The often-told "luxury tax" version is therefore somewhat inaccurate. It was not about a general luxury tax on expensive watches, but about a specific import duty burden for watch movements, which were assessed for customs purposes based on characteristics such as jewel count, movement type, and later also components. Even today's US customs decisions show the same system, where the watch as a whole is not uniformly taxed, but components such as the movement, case, and strap can be separately tariff-relevant.

An important subtlety that resolves the apparent contradiction is this: for US customs and stamping regulations, only jewels that "serve a mechanical purpose as friction bearings" were explicitly counted. Purely decorative gemstones – i.e., the majority of the spectacular 39-, 64-, or 100-jewel numbers – were not counted at all. A "100 Jewels" watch often had only its approximately 17 functional jewel bearings for customs purposes and thus remained below the expensive threshold. This is precisely why such show models could be offered in the USA despite customs duties.

For the Jewel Wars, this is particularly interesting because two opposing forces met here: On the one hand, the market made the jewel count a visible promise of quality – more jewels seemed more valuable. On the other hand, US customs placed an economic brake on more than 17 functional jewels. This resulted in a strange double standard: for genuine jewel bearings, 17 often remained the sensible limit for the customs-sensitive export market; on the dial, however, where decorative jewels counted, the number for prestige, domestic market, and show models could soar ever higher – up to 39, 64, or even 100 jewels.

The End of the War

Three forces ended the craze. First, the claim that more jewels meant better quality collapsed as soon as collectors and experts started opening movements and counting the blind jewels. Second, regulators intervened: in 1965, the Swiss Standards Association NIHS stipulated that only functional jewels could be mentioned in advertising; in the US, the Federal Trade Commission pushed in the same direction with its truth-in-advertising rules; and in 1974, the international standard ISO 1112 ("Functional and non-functional jewels") finally brought clarity – it explicitly defined that, for example, the jewels on a winding oscillating weight could not be counted as functional. This removed the advertising basis for hundred-jewel watches.

Third, however, an entirely different invention made the question meaningless overnight: in 1969, Seiko introduced the Astron, the world's first quartz wristwatch. Suddenly, it was no longer about jewels, but about quartz crystals and monthly accuracy – and the entire arithmetic of the Jewel Wars became a footnote.

What Remains – A Word to Collectors

For us today, the highly jeweled Japanese watches of the 1960s are small time capsules of a confident, slightly megalomaniacal decade. One should read the number on the dial with a smile and a discerning eye: a 35-jewel 6218 or a three-hand Grand Seiko carries its jewels legitimately; a 39-jewel Seikomatic is a wonderful piece, but one should know it for what it is – about one-third theater. And an Orient Grand Prix 100 is less a better movement than a magnificent monument to the era, a collector's item and a top-notch conversation starter.

Perhaps that is the real point of the Jewel Wars: they tell us less about jewel bearings than about us buyers – about the eternal temptation to equate quality with a single large number. Japanese brands played this game with particular verve, and that is precisely why their jewel records are so appealing today. One just has to know where the real rubies end and the sparkle begins.

Author: FB