History

Daiwa Kogyo, Ltd. was founded in 1942 by Hisao Yamazaki in Suwa, Nagano. The company was backed by an investment from the Hattori family (founder of the Seiko Group) and began as a manufacturer of watch parts. It started operation in a 2,500 square-foot renovated miso storehouse with 22 employees. In 1943 Daini Seikosha (currently Seiko Instruments) established a factory in Suwa for manufacturing Seiko watches with Daiwa Kogyo. In 1959 the Suwa Factory of Daini Seikosha was split off and merged with Daiwa Kogyo to form Suwa Seikosha Co., Ltd. The company has developed and commercialized many timepiece technologies. In particular, it developed the world's first portable quartz timer (Seiko QC-951) in 1963, the world's first quartz watch (Seiko Quartz Astron 35SQ) in 1969, the world's first automatic power generating quartz watch (Seiko Auto-Quartz) in 1988 and the Spring Drive watch movement in 1999. Manufacturing watches still constitutes one of the major businesses of Seiko Epson. The watches made by the company are sold through the Seiko Watch Corporation, a subsidiary of Seiko Holdings Corporation.

In 1961 Shinshu Seiki Co., Ltd. was established as a subsidiary of Suwa Seikosha to supply precision parts for Seiko watches. When the Seiko Group was selected to be the official time keeper for the Tokyo Olympic games in 1964, a printing timer was required to time events, and Shinshu Seiki started development of an electronic printer. In September 1968, Shinshu Seiki launched the world's first miniprinter, the EP-101 (EP stands for Electronic Printer,) which was soon incorporated into many calculators. In June 1975, the name Epson was coined after the next generation of the EP-101 was released to the public ("Son of EP-101" became "Son of EP" which in turn became "Epson"). So in effect, the company's new name meant "son of electronic printer." In April of the same year Epson America Inc. was established to sell printers for Shinshu Seiki Co.

In November 1981 Epson introduced the worlds first true laptop that was ultimately portable at 3.5 lbs, the Epson_HX-20 which featured a full-size keyboard, Two Hitachi 6301 CPU's running @ 0.614MHz, an LCD screen (20 X 4 text), dot-matrix printer, storage device, RS232/Serial Port, 16k ram (32k max), built-in rechargeable batteries. Microsoft BASIC was pre-loaded in the ROM, unit was carried with its own carrying case.

In July 1982, Shinshu Seiki officially named itself the Epson Corporation and launched the world's first handheld computer, the HX-20 (HC-20), and in May 1983 the world's first portable color LCD TV was developed and launched by the company.

In November 1985, the Suwa Seikosha Co., Ltd. and the Epson Corporation merged to form the Seiko Epson Corporation.

The company developed the Micro Piezo inkjet technology, which uses a piezoelectric crystal in each nozzle and does not heat the ink at the print head to project the ink onto the page, and released Epson MJ-500 inkjet printer (Epson Stylus 800) in March 1993. Shortly after, in 1994, Epson released the first high resolution color inkjet printer (considering 720x720 dpi high resolution), the Epson Stylus Color (P860A). This printer also utilized the Micro Piezo head technology.