Howard Riehl sent me some scans and photos and asked if I could crop and scale and submit them here for community interest.
Well, here they are with little comment of mine:
The scans suggest that your Roger Riehl was issuing orders for parts for a run of 100 watches early in June, 1971.
600 Hamlin Reed Switches, 100 Solar Cell Arrays, 100 Quartz Crystals 32.768kHz (BTW quite pricy parts at that time - $6.50 for ONE quartz crystal (1971's Dollars)!
Not sure what this could mean in terms of "going to market", but anyway I am not willing to participate in
that "who was first" debate.
I leave it up to others to draw a timeline with PROVEN points of LED watch history.
Here's a newspaper article about Roger Riehl and the Synchronar of February 11, 1971:
Here we have what looks to me like a VERY early prototype (maybe even hardwired to show constant digits on the LED display):
I asked if this was the same watch as in the newspaper article above (compare the strap), and asked for more photos.
Howard answered: "...And yes I have the watch from the article (photo I sent) which was taken in 1969 or 1970. It is not the newspapers photo. He actually had the 2nd prototype complete at the time of the article."
