On this 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, here’s a bit of history behind the Speedmaster’s “crystal” and Nick Hayek, CEO of the Swatch Group:

In 1992 I was the Chief Technical advisor at AT&T, as well as VP research at Bell Labs. AT&T and Swatch were in joint venture negotiations, and one of my responsibilities for the deal was to evaluate the Swatch Group’s technology platform. So we purchased a number of watches for reverse engineering, including the Omega Speedmaster Moon watch.

The Moon watch’s crystal was made from PMMA, a tough shatter-proof plastic trademarked “Hesalite”. Also known as acrylic. While sapphire is harder, it’s also brittle and can fragment on impact. Clearly an issue in the vacuum of outer space.

One evening at a team dinner with Nick (who, BTW was a fascinating person- a mix of Danny DeVito and Thomas Edison) I asked why such an expensive watch was still paired with a plastic crystal. Nick insisted it was sapphire, so we walked over to my lab and I tapped on the crystal of the disassembled Speedmaster. It made a dull clicking sound. Plastic. Nick looked perplexed, so I grabbed a hot soldering iron and plunged it through the crystal, melting a clean hole. Nick said nothing for a moment, then immediately got on the phone and called Switzerland in the middle of their night, and (to my ears) reamed out the factory manager in Swiss-German.

When Nick reappeared (with sly smile) he said “We were supposed to switch back to sapphire after the moon program. It will be sapphire from now on”.

I later spoke with the factory manage who confirmed this story. Of course, the Speedmaster is offered with both sapphire and Hesalite crystals today. And not sure what happened after our deal fell through. But the entire experience was vintage Nick….