Mencyclopaedia: Casio G-Shock

Last month I chucked an expensive watch off a cliff. Before that, I'd banged it on a tree trunk, rubbed it into a track, thrown it for a drooler of a terrier to fetch, knocked it against the jagged wall of a swimming pool, left it with a three-year-old to do his worst with, and even allowed it to roast for a few minutes in the embers of a camp fire.

This was neither carelessness, nor insurance scam, but a test. The watch - catchily named MTG-1500B-1A1EF - was a £500 "premium" model from Casio's 30-year-old G-Shock range. The strap on my own watch had broken just days before a trip to visit family in Australia, so I'd borrowed it from Casio - and was invited to rough it up as much as I wanted along the way.

Knuckleduster heavy and clad in stainless steel and rubber, it kept on beeping on the hour, every hour, whatever the abuse. That beeping was annoying (the lack of instructions made it complicated to operate), but useful when searching for it at the bottom of that cliff.

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G-Shocks are not beautiful, but they do have a sinister, Batmobile-type of armoured ruggedness that some people appreciate. Their key attribute, though, is durability. Online, there are films of G-Shock owners giving their watches abuse in ways far more creative than mine: they are strapped to baseball bats and smashed on breezeblocks, frozen, jammed in electrical fans and shot. They rarely shatter.

This is thanks to an engineer named Kikuo Ibe, who was working in Casio's research and development department in 1981 when he dropped, and broke, a watch that had belonged to his father. "That was an extremely precious watch," he later said, "and there it was, completely smashed." He decided to attempt to build a near-indestructible alternative, and had already gone through 200 prototypes by the time he noticed a small girl playing with a ball in his local park. "Suddenly," he said, "the solution was obvious. I imagined that bouncing ball containing a floating watch engine, which would remain unaffected when the ball hit the ground, absorbing the impact."

The first G-Shock, the DW-5000 (they all have these romantic names), was launched in 1983. It was a cheap LCD watch floating in a chunky tank case, but though successful, was no sensation. Yet Casio kept plugging away, producing variations on Ibe's initial theme, and in the 1990s they took off, becoming fashion statements in both Japan and the US.

Left to right: GB-6900AA-1B £160, the original DW-5000C-1A, and the GA-303B-1A £160

As colourful as Swatch watches, but as oversized as a weightlifter on steroids, they reached their peak of popularity in 1998 when 19 million G-Shock and Baby G (the smaller version) watches were sold. In total, the company has sold over 70 million. Military personnel seem to be particularly keen - there are some great galleries of soldiers, pilots and frogmen flashing their heftily accessorised wrists - and last year the company produced a limited edition model in collaboration with the RAF.

Casio works hard to keep the G-Shock name popular, hiring snowboarders, surfers and skateboarders as ambassadors, or placing the models in Hollywood action films.

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And there are now hundreds of models, from supercharged, beeping, radio-linked, Bluetoothed, solar-powered, self-setting chronographs like the one I used, all the way down to straightforward, low-spec £60-ish versions of Ibe's original model (the DW-5600-1VER looks closest).

Via: Mencyclopaedia: Casio G-Shock