Junghans, Germany’s most successful watchmaker apart from Lange and Sohne, had always been operating from its Schramberg watchmaking factories in the former East Germany, and was continuing the innovation that had transformed the business from a family firm making wooden cuckoo clocks to one of the world’s great volume producers of mechanical movements and wristwatches in the post-war decades.
Junghans’ response to the quartz crisis was to redouble its research into the most accurate forms of timekeeping and, by 1990, the year of Reunification of East and West Germany, it was ready with the world’s first wristwatch that kept to perfect time by synching with radio-controlled timing signals. Now that first radio-controlled watch, the Mega 1, has been recreated on the 35th anniversary of its launch in three limited editions using the same radical asymmetric design credited to German-American product designer Hartmut Esslinger.
Named the Mega Futura, each of the three 80-piece limited edition watches has the same large LCD display running off a multi-frequency radio-controlled Caliber J604.90, which was developed and assembled in Schramberg itself. In addition to showing the time in either 12- or 24-hour form, the watch also displays the calendar week, the day of the week, and the date.
The watch is actually as a perpetual calendar because it will always be updated with the correct time and date by communicating with the atomic clock of the Physikalisch- Technische Bundesanstalt (the national metrology institute of the Federal Republic of Germany) while in Europe or similar transmitters in the United States or Japan. Mega Futura watches measure 38.5mm x 44mm and are water resistant to 5 bar. For less than 500 euro, you can have a radio-controlled watch on your wrist. Casio is another mainstream watchmaker that makes radio-controlled and atomic-controlled watches.
