Yahoo Autos How the Casio G-Shock Became a Style Icon
How many designers have thrown their masterpiece out a third-story window? To test his ultimate go-anywhere watch, Casio engineer Kikuo Ibe did just that. Ibe demanded that it withstand a trio of rigors: go 10 years on a single battery, withstand 10 atmospheres of water pressure, and survive a 10-meter fall. His concept survived these trials, and the G-Shock was born.
This story originally appeared in Volume 5 of Road & Track.
That was 1981. In the decades since, the humble G became iconic, then highly collectible and even fashionable: Kanye, Rihanna, Pharrell, and countless other A-list mononyms have sported a G. But the watch never strayed far from its mission, providing supreme function and durability above all. To illustrate, we present this battle-scarred DW5600, available unblemished behind any Walmart jewelry counter for $40. This modern interpretation stays close to the iconic original’s form. Its rubberized case insulates the quartz movement from shock and acts as an exoskeleton to disperse forces that would obliterate a mortal timepiece. Casio once drove a 50,000-pound truck over a watch just like this for publicity. The G kept on (metaphorically) ticking, and captured a Guinness World Record.
Paired with its near-indestructibility, the humble G offers a genuinely useful spread of tools: time and date, alarm, countdown timer, and stopwatch. Casio will sell you a far fiddlier G-Shock variant that tracks everything from the tide to the phase of the moon, but even in its basic form, the watch is flight-qualified by NASA, ubiquitous on the wrists of soldiers, trusted by adventurers, and strapped on by anyone who might point four wheels at the unknown.
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