Casio – an Icon from Japan
The Japanese company, Casio, which is known throughout the world for its enduring and reliable large watches, was founded in 1946, in Tokyo, by an engineer, Tadao Kashio. About thirty years later, Casio became an important part of the global revolution in watchmaking industry, as a manufacturer of a number of iconic timepieces.
After gaining a substantial profit with his initial major product called yubiwa pipe and after seeing the electric calculators at Business Show in 1949, Tadao Kashio and his younger brothers decided to construct their own calculators. Eight years later, Casio introduced the first completely electric compact calculator and soon started to expand and create new products – audio components, cameras and musical instruments.
Casio Casiotron 1974The Japanese company joined the timepiece market in 1974, with its first model, a digital wristwatch called Casiotron which featured automatic calendar. Casio began making timepieces only after the electronic watch revolution, but its background as a calculator manufacturer provided technical expertise.
Inovations from Casio
Their success in the other electronic markets also provided a massive boost for Tokyo based firm to produce watches with numerous technological innovations. Casio is one of the first brands that developed quartz crystal watches, both digital and analog. In the eighties, Casio presented the first model with a thermometer and another one that included a feature of translating 1,500 Japanese words into English.
This was the decade when they also launched their iconic scientific calculator timepiece, labeled as a model CFX-400. From that time on, Casio made more models of calculator watches than any other company. The Japanese watchmakers are still considered to be the most important company that produces this sort of timepieces.
During the eighties, Casio also started selling the Data Bank Calculator watch, the series that included not only a calculator, but could also be used for storing appointments, names, addresses and phone numbers. This was also the time of introduction of an interesting new approach that developers took.
G-Shock Era
The company’s goal was to create an ultimate, tough and unbreakable watch that could reach a “Triple 10” concept – a new type of product that can withstand 10 meter free-fall, and also has a 10 bar water resistance accompanied with a battery which lasts for 10 years. The design team produced more than 200 prototypes and after two years, the first G-shock watch was launched.
The first G-Shock model DW-5000C was released in April 1983 and soon, the new models followed. All the G-Shocks are resistant to knocks and vibrations. Every model has a certain sort of stopwatch, a countdown timer and a water resistance.
First G-Shock Watch
The G-Shock became tremendously popular throughout the 1990s, and a demand for this product reached its peak in 1998. In that year, 220 new models were released and the Casio G-Shock was the choice of 19 million people in the world. G-Shock is often a preferable watch of police officers, paramedics, firemen and soldiers.
Nowadays, this line of timepieces includes atomic clock synchronization, which means that they receive time signals from the extremely accurate atomic clocks. This is also a standard feature for Casio Wave Ceptor series.
The G-Shock and the other models of Casio today include a self-contained Tough Solar battery charging system with a solar cell and a rechargeable battery and they both last as long as the watch. This line of products and the Baby-G (the G-Shock for women) are still the most popular ones among Casio watches. Other notable series are Oceanus, Edifice and Casio Sport.
