Type | Privately Held Company |
---|---|
Industry | Retail Jewellery |
Founded | Clerkenwell, London |
Founder | Asher Loftus Rebecca Loftus and Sophie Loftus |
Headquarters | Leicestershire |
Products | Watches |
Parent | Time Products (UK) LTD |
Website | www.accurist.co.uk |
Accurist Watches Ltd is an English watch manufacturer, headquartered in Leicestershire. The brand was established in 1946 in St John Street, Clerkenwell, London, by Asher and Rebecca Loftus.
Accurist became the first company to sponsor the United Kingdom's speaking clock service between 1986 and 2008, [1] and also sponsored a Millennium Countdown clock at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, which counted down the last 1,000 days before the year 2000 at the historic observatory. [2]
The Loftus family maintained ownership of the company until 2014 when Time Products Limited, which operate Sekonda and Limit, acquired the brand. [3]
Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is the mean solar time at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, counted from midnight. At different times in the past, it has been calculated in different ways, including being calculated from noon; as a consequence, it cannot be used to specify a particular time unless a context is given. The term 'GMT' is also used as one of the names for the time zone UTC+00:00 and, in UK law, is the basis for civil time in the United Kingdom.
A watch is a portable timepiece intended to be carried or worn by a person. It is designed to keep a consistent movement despite the motions caused by the person's activities. A wristwatch is designed to be worn around the wrist, attached by a watch strap or other type of bracelet, including metal bands, leather straps or any other kind of bracelet. A pocket watch is designed for a person to carry in a pocket, often attached to a chain.
A time signal is a visible, audible, mechanical, or electronic signal used as a reference to determine the time of day.
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The quartz crisis was the upheaval in the watchmaking industry caused by the advent of quartz watches in the 1970s and early 1980s, that largely replaced mechanical watches around the world. It caused a significant decline of the Swiss watchmaking industry, which chose to remain focused on traditional mechanical watches, while the majority of the world's watch production shifted to Asian companies such as Seiko, Citizen, and Casio in Japan, which embraced the new electronic technology.
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Railway time was the standardised time arrangement first applied by the Great Western Railway in England in November 1840, the first recorded occasion when different local mean times were synchronised and a single standard time applied. The key goals behind introducing railway time were to overcome the confusion caused by having non-uniform local times in each town and station stop along the expanding railway network and to reduce the incidence of accidents and near misses, which were becoming more frequent as the number of train journeys increased.
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