Towards electronic high precision

In 1984, Longines added another model to the Conquest range, a timepiece made of two-tone PVD-coated steel, and fitted with a quartz electronic calibre developed in the workshops of the manufacture in Saint-Imier using a technology which had been developed in Les Longines. Once the issue of the thickness of the quartz movement had been resolved, towards the end of the 70s, the R&D department turned its attention to another field, that of high precision. At the beginning of the 1980s, the focus of research for the engineers at the factory in Les Longines, as far as the design of the electronic movement was concerned, was on evaluating new perspectives, in particular finding solutions to the way variations in temperature affected the properties of quartz. The work resulted in the construction of the 276 VHP (very high precision) calibre, a thin quartz movement fitted with an oscillator thermo-compensated by a tuning fork type quartz oscillating at 262144 Hz. This additional device, i.e. a thermometer quartz, provided better functioning than other quartz electronic calibres. In addition, this high-precision movement benefited from development work carried out at the start of the decade to improve batteries by the use of lithium.