It has been my great fortune over four decades to have had a front-row seat at the making of the modern watch world. As I see it, today’s watch world was created by a series of four revolutions that, each in its turn, roiled the industry, creating not just fascinating new watches, but new categories of watches, as well as new watch consumers, brands, companies and groups.

Those revolutions are the Quartz Watch Revolution of the 1970s, the Fashion Watch Revolution of the 1980s, the Mechanical Renaissance of the 1990s, and today’s Smartwatch Revolution.