Kikuo Ibe's idea for an indestructible watch started with an accident: he dropped his own watch at work and watched it break. The fix he eventually landed on came from a rubber ball he saw children bouncing in a park — a watch module suspended inside a hollow, shock-absorbing case, floating free of the impacts that would reach a normal watch. Getting there took two years and, by his own account, more than 200 failed prototypes, tested by throwing them out of a bathroom window to see if they'd survive the fall.
The result was the DW-5000C, launched in April 1983 — the watch that started G-Shock. This GW-M5610U-1JF still carries that original watch's exact case shape and dial layout, just built with technology Ibe didn't have in 1983: Tough Solar charging and Multiband 6 radio sync that corrects the time automatically from six stations worldwide. Forty years later, it's the same shape that survived the bathroom-window test, just running on light instead of a battery.
