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| Joined: | Fri Aug 31st, 2007 |
| Location: | Alberta Canada |
| Posts: | 343 |
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By the way there was an article in Watch Time magazine a couple issues back Dec 2007 page 92 actually... which discussed the origin of Super Luminova and Seiko
Paraphrased from article: RC Tritec AG was the first manufacture of "strontium aluminated" named SuperLite and showed up in Swatches in 1993. One year, Japense firm Nemoto was granted a patent on strontium aluminate enriched with europium and dysprosium (which was the same substance that Tritec had already commercialized)... Nemoto's patent prevented the import of Swatches to the Japan and the US that contained the "Lume". Same year, Seiko launched watches that were lumed with Nemotos mixture materials and called it LumiBrite (doesn't clarify if Seiko altered or added anything to the mixture)
RC Tritec and Nemoto reached agreement in 1998 and founded a joint venture named LumiNova AG, under this agreement, Tritec ordered the mixture from Nemoto, and processed it in Teufen to attain right color and size in Switzerland according to customer's order specs. They named this "SumperLuminova".
Although SuperLuminova was Swiss Made, many Swiss watch manufactures were troubled that it was a Japanese-Swiss joint venture. Nemoto therefore agreed to grant LumiNova AG a license to fabricate super-luminova in Switz... which is what we now know today as "Super-Luminova".
I found it interesting..
I was just going to mention this article. It was a good one!