CASIO

The history of CASIO

The late Kashio Tadao started Kashio Seisakujo in Mitaka, Tokyo, Japan, in April 1946. Kashio was a talented engineer who, after graduating from high school, enrolled in Waseda Koshu Gakko with the assistance of a factory owner with whom he worked.

The yubiwa pipe was his first commercially successful product. It was a ring that wrapped around the user's finger and held a cigarette, allowing them to smoke hands-free. Tadao and his three younger brothers, Toshio, Kazuo, and Yukio, were able to use the earnings from their innovation to build a new sort of calculator when the yubiwa pipe became a huge hit.

The brothers took notice of foreign-made electric calculators during the inaugural Business Show in Ginza, Tokyo, in 1949.

The hand-operated calculator, which employed gears and a hand crank, was the most common form of calculator in Japan at the time.

Electric calculators with a small motor to move the gears were already appearing in other countries, but they couldn't be made in Japan since processing the parts required a high degree of knowledge and unique grade materials.

Toshio, on the other hand, believed that by employing only electrical circuits and no mechanical elements, he could solve the problems with contemporary electric calculators.In 1954, the brothers succeeded in producing Japan's first electric calculator after multiple prototypes.

The brothers finished a calculator with a continuous multiplication function in 1956, which was the missing piece in their first electric calculator.

They also had a 10-key number pad, which was unusual at the time because most calculators used a complete keypad.

They also used a single display window instead of three, which was a unique design.

As a result, the first successful small calculator was developed, and the office calculator was born.

Casio Computer Co., Ltd. was founded in June 1957, and the business produced the Model 14-A, which retailed for 485,000 yen.

The Model 14-A was the world's first relay-based all-electric small calculator.

Due to the over saturation of the calculator industry in the early 1970s, Casio determined that they needed to broaden their product line.

Casio was a latecomer to the watch market, but with the emergence of quartz technology in watches, the company decided to capitalize on the technology and create digital timepieces.

The idea was to reach out to those who wished to buy digital timepieces.

The CASIOTRON, Casio's first electronic wristwatch, was introduced in 1974.

The CASIOTRON was remarkable in that it could not only display the hours, minutes, and seconds, but it could also calculate the number of days in a month automatically.

The display was a liquid crystal digital display, and it cost under $200 USD at the time of its debut, making it quite inexpensive in compared to Swiss and other Japanese competitors.

The tendency in watchmaking from the mid-70s through the mid-80s was to make thin, lightweight timepieces.

Casio, on the other hand, bucked the trend in 1983 with the release of the G-SHOCK DW-5000C.

Casio desired a watch with a tough design that could withstand being dropped and slammed without breaking.

Due of its distinctive design, it only gained on in a few areas at initially, with the United States being the largest.

The Baby-G SHOCK model for ladies was introduced in 1994.

The G-popularity SHOCK's rose during the 1990s, with demand peaked around 1998.

Casio has launched over 200 distinct G-SHOCK versions by that time, with 19 million units sold globally.

While the G-Shock was the watch that cemented Casio's reputation as a watchmaker, the Japanese business also produced a number of other unusual and fascinating timepieces during that period.

The Databank Telememo 10 (CD-40), for example, was one of the first digital watches to be produced in the 1980s, allowing the wearer to store information in the watch.

Up to 10 groups of 16 letters or digits might be saved using the databank feature.

The watch, as you might expect, was a major changer since it eliminated the need to carry about a physical organizer.

Within five years of its first introduction, the watch became a huge hit, selling a total of 6 million copies.

Casio introduced a nearly paper-thin watch in 1985 that combined a watch and a plastic bracelet into one unit. It was created utilizing an unique hybrid molding process that integrated plastic molding and microelectronics and was dubbed the PELA FS-10. It was barely 12 grams in weight and was 3.9 millimeters thick.

The BM-100WJ was a digital watch with a weather-prediction feature that was released in 1989.

The watch contained an inbuilt sensor that measured air pressure in three-hour increments and displayed the information on a bar graph.

The weather would improve as the bar on the right-hand side went up, and it would worsen when it went down.

It might also provide the wearer an estimate of their height or underwater depth.

The WQV-1 Wrist Camera, the first wristwatch digital camera, was released to the world in the year 2000.

It was a compact and lightweight watch and camera combo that allowed users to capture a picture and then see it on the watch display.

The image might also be sent to another WQV-1 Wrist Camera or a computer via the watch.

Casio's watchmaking ability and ingenuity in the digital watch sector was, in many respects, a forerunner to today's smart watches.

While nearly all of these capabilities can now be found on smartwatches, Casio and other digital watchmakers were ahead of their time when these innovative and unusual watch features were first introduced.

While Casio's product range extends beyond watches and calculators, this article focuses on the company's history in the watchmaking business. Casio revolutionized the watch business with its digital timepieces in the 1970s and 1980s, and went on to create one of the most popular watch lines of all time with the G-Shock, with the original G-Shock DW5000C being a highly sought-after collectors item.