LITRONIX LED 1975
Litronix of USA was a leading semi-conductor company with great achievements in the 1970's digital watch revolution. Not many people are aware that most watch manufacturers would not succeed without the first reliable and mass produced LED and LCD displays from Litronix. Perform some surgery on your beloved Pulsars and early LCD's (Gruen Teletime, Westclox Quartzmatic, Elgin Time Capsule) and you will surely find Litronix symbols sometimes shortened to LXD. With the rapid boom for digital watches many suppliers of components decided to acquire a piece of the market by changing their strategies into vertical integration and offer fully assembled watches. Watchmaking was no longer reserved for traditional watch companies and gave room for Hughes Aircraft, National Semiconductor, Fairchild, Texas Instruments, etc.
Semi-conductor companies acquired external know-how or developed inhouse expertease and launched their own watches what lead to dramatic drop of prices from the top-shelf level established by Pulsar in 1972. By the end of the 1970's anybody could afford a digital or analog quartz watch produced by electronics producers what in result killed a major part of the traditional watch market. Most of these producers targeted their products to economy customers so you can hardly expect fancy and advanced solutions like the auto-set or auto-command features found in Pulsars. The only factor was cost in order to provide the wide public with a simple digital time-calculating device. So there you have it :) The Litronix pictured here is the most simple LED you can imagine with magnifying bubble lenses on top of tiny diodes.
Keywords: litronix led
Market value: 15-100$ (model, condition, box)