GLANCE at any technology blog, and all the innovation in the world of timekeeping seems to be captured by two words: smart watches. Almost every week new designs emerge from electronics giants such as Samsung and Sony, Kickstarted minnows like Pebble and Martian, and even the odd pop star (will.i.am says his smart watch will go on sale this summer). So what new product is Swatch—which in 1983 transformed dull digital watches into must-have fashion accessories, thus saving Switzerland’s watch industry—now launching? A self-winding mechanical watch it calls Sistem51.

Smart watches tend not to be very innovative: most are a mash-up of phone, activity-tracker and music-player. Although almost 2m of them were sold worldwide last year, many buyers swiftly lose interest. Endeavour Partners, a consultancy, reckons a third of Americans who buy a “wearable” device stop wearing it within six months.

Run-of-the-mill digital quartz watches, too, have seen few real technological advances. Some now sport GPS, solar power and a variety of fancy screens, but commoditisation has pushed down average prices to only a few dollars—and largely squeezed out innovation.

That leaves “old-fashioned” mechanical watches, where innovation is being driven by two factors. The first is the vast profits still made in and around Switzerland’s “watch valley”, near Lake Neuchâtel. In 2013 the country exported 28.1m timepieces at an average price of $830 (an average skewed down by Swatch, which sold a vast but undisclosed number of its quirky quartz watches at $50-215 each). The second is a series of technological breakthroughs, spurred by unexpected uses of untraditional materials, that may in time transform the industry.

Sistem51 seeks to do for old-style watches what Swatch did for digital timepieces three decades ago. Then, Swatch used innovative design and automation to cut the number of parts in a quartz watch from about 90 to 51. Sistem51 takes the 200 or more parts in a mechanical watch and cuts that to 51, too. To do this, Swatch built a minimalist movement out of ARCAP, an alloy of copper, nickel and zinc that is anti-magnetic—magnets are an enemy of accuracy in mechanical watches. Because it resists magnetism, the movement needs no regulator mechanism. It is regulated and sealed at the factory, where assembly is fully automated, a first for mechanical watches. Sistem51 may be 100% Swiss-made, but its makers are Helvetian robots. It will cost about $150 when it goes on sale in America later this year.

But it is silicon that is truly revolutionising traditional watches, many of which now contain more of the material than any smart watch. At the heart of a mechanical watch is the delicate hairspring, balance-wheel, escapement-wheel and pallet mechanism; in simple terms, these are the elements of the watch that count each second and ensure accuracy. Traditionally, like the rest of a watch’s powertrain, they are made of metal. This means that they need lubrication, are impaired by magnetism, shock, heat and cold, and wear out.

Silicon shirks these problems. A number of watch firms, using a technique known as deep reactive-ion etching, are now shaping silicon wafers into hairsprings, escapement wheels and pallets—and sometimes even balance-wheels. Silicon is lighter, harder and stronger than metal. Etched into tiny skeletal structures that would be impossible to form with metal, it becomes the featherweight heart of a mechanism that can run at a far higher frequency (speed), which means greater accuracy. The silicon parts are virtually frictionless, so need no lubrication, and are immune to most external forces. And when bonded with a synthetic-diamond or carbon coating, silicon’s only real drawback, brittleness, can also be overcome.

Girard-Perregaux keeps it constant But watchmakers are not simply using silicon as a metal substitute. One snag with all mechanical watches is that their accuracy changes with their position because it is affected by gravity. In the late 18th century Abraham-Louis Breguet, a legendary Franco-Swiss watchmaker, tried to combat this by enclosing the entire balance-wheel and escapement mechanism in a rotating cage—an invention known as a tourbillon. These are still to be found in some timepieces, but only partly counter the effects of gravity, and make the watch both complex and costly. The Breguet watch company still exists (as part of Swatch’s empire), and has now come up with a different way to defy gravity. Having made its new watch with anti-magnetic silicon components, Breguet was able to insert powerful micro-magnets at each end of the carbon-steel balance-staff that spins the watch’s balance-wheel. The magnets stabilise the staff in a strong magnetic field—so strong that its lower tip floats freely, reducing friction on that end to zero. The field is also powerful enough to resist the effects of gravity and shocks. Breguet’s timepiece (as shown in the first picture) rivals digital watches for accuracy (-1 to +3 seconds a day), regardless of its position. And because it can run at a very high frequency, it measures to 1/20th of a second. But at $40,000 it is hardly cheap. Another drawback of a traditional watch is that as the mainspring uncoils, the power that the escapement transfers to the balance-wheel declines, making the watch run slower. To fix this, watchmakers have long tried to design a “constant force” escapement to transfer precisely the same amount of energy regardless of how fully the watch is wound. Few have made much headway. But Girard-Perregaux, a watchmaker working with the Swiss Centre for Electronics and Microtechnology, seems to have made a breakthrough. The firm’s “constant escapement” uses a strip of silicon 14 microns wide (visible in the second picture) anchored at both ends and in its centre. When compressed from each end it causes each half of the strip to “buckle”, the left half in one direction, the right half in the other direction. When a force is applied to the buckle on one half of the strip—via one of two escapement wheels that draw power from the mainspring—it instantly snaps to being buckled in the other direction. Because of how silicon buckles, this delivers a precise, unvarying pulse of energy to the balance-wheel. The same then happens to the other half’s buckle, and so on, back and forth, tick by tock. The mechanism loses so little energy that the watch will run for a week without winding.

True, at $123,500 it costs about the same as a decent Maserati—and all have been pre-sold. But as with Breguet’s magnetic pivot and other innovations likely to emerge from the Swiss watchmakers, expect prices of such mechanical marvels to start ticking down.