Hughes Aircraft Company was a high-tech electronics company based in the
Los Angeles area of Southern California (USA). They were well known for
their work as a defense contractor for radar systems, missiles, and
satellites. While most of the electronic divisions were sold off to
companies such as Raytheon and Boeing, the company in its present form
does still have one new and very profitable business venture today which
is their Direct TV satellite system. (Editor's note: even this remnant
of the once-proud company has been recently sold off to another
company.)
In the mid-1970s, their semiconductor manufacturing operation (based in
Newport Beach, California) was one of the world's leading producer of
modules for the new LED electronic watches that had just come on the
market. The module is the internal "guts" of the watch, including a
housing, LED display, IC, crystal, and space for batteries. The module
includes everything except the case and band.
Hughes did not generally sell the watches direct to consumers. Hughes
made the modules and watch companies would put the modules in their
cases and sell them as Benrus, Timex, Sears, etc. Sometimes Hughes
purchased cases from case manufacturers and supplied the final watches
to marketing companies - but never with the Hughes name. Hughes did sell
some of the unbranded watches in their company store to employees and
their families. There area few with the Hughes logo on them that may
have been marketing samples.
Hughes modules started as simple time pieces with time and date
functions. But through their engineering know-how and the advances in
technology, Hughes added additional features. One novel innovation added
a message to the watch that would be shown when the watch owner would
press a button. "Carter for President," "USA Bicentennial," "Class of
1976" were typical types of messages. Shortly after, Hughes had
developed a user-programmable watch where the user could program his own
message simply by pushing the buttons on his watch in a certain
sequence.
One of the final projects that Hughes took on in the watch business was
a calculator watch. In about 1976-78, they developed a module that was
large (for a watch) and almost square in shape. The keypad was almost
the size of the module and had rubber-ized hooked via a flexible circuit
to the module. This calculator watch had the four basic functions,
percent, and apparently at least one memory. The display was a red LED.
The watch used 4 batteries (357s).
The watch itself was about 1.5 x 1.75 inches in size and just over .5
inch thick. It was very heavy and used up batteries very quickly. The
case had at least 2 major style variations. One was a "boxy" style and
the other was a "curvy" style. (These "very technical" terms are mine.)
The curvy-style watch came in two color variations -- gold-tone or
chrome-tone case. In both colors, the back plate was silver-colored
steel. The boxy style seemed to be available only in the chrome color.
The Hughes company is not mentioned anywhere on any of the watches. In
this case, Hughes had cases made and tried to market the complete watch
to watch companies. CompuChron was the only company known to sell the
Hughes calc watch under their own name.
Around that time, Hughes also moved into the LCD-display market with
modules that had LCD or dual LCD-LED displays.
Unfortunately the digital watch market was changing as overseas
manufacturing flooded the market with less-expensive modules. The
profits Hughes saw with their module manufacturing business began to
disappear and management decided to get out of that business in the late
1970s.
For information about this site contact Ed Cantarellal at The reference section of www.TheDigitalWatch.com)">mrcalc@usa.net