Seiko built the Marvel - like the 1958 Seiko Marvel Ref. 14024 "Yokogawa Electric Works" (YEW) service award manual-wound mechanical dress watch here - with the intention of improving accuracy, productivity, and ease of maintenance in its watches, with a debut on Time Memorial Day, June 10, 1956.
 
Why do we label this Seiko Marvel a Yokogawa Electric Works watch? 
 
On the caseback of this watch are inscribed "YEW," an acronym for Yokogawa Electric Works, and Kanji Japanese that translates to "Long Service Award, 1958." 
 
Yokogawa Electric Works (YEW), now known as Yokogawa Electric Corporation (横河電機株式会社, Yokogawa-denki Kabushiki-kaisha), is a Japanese multinational electrical engineering and software company, with businesses based on its measurement, control, and information technologies.  Founded in 1915, it is well known globally and historically for its electrical and electronic measuring instruments with over 19,000 employees across dozens of subsidiaries and affiliates worldwide.
 
Yokogawa pioneered the development of distributed control systems and introduced its Centum series DCS in 1975.  Some of Yokogawa's most recognizable products are production control systems, test and measurement instruments, pressure transmitters, flow meters, oxygen analyzers, fieldbus instruments, manufacturing execution systems and advanced process control.
 
Yokogawa traces its roots back to 1915, when Dr. Tamisuke Yokogawa, a renowned architect, established an electric meter research institute in Shibuya, Tokyo. After pioneering the development and production of electric meters in Japan, this enterprise was incorporated in 1920 as Yokogawa Electric Works Ltd.
 
In the years following the war, Yokogawa went public, developed its first electronic recorders, signed a technical assistance agreement for industrial instruments with the U.S. firm Foxboro, and opened its first overseas sales office (New York).  In the 1960s the company made a full-scale entry into the industrial analyzer market and launched the development, manufacturing, and sales of vortex flowmeters, and in the decade following established its first manufacturing plant outside Japan (Singapore), opened a sales office in Europe, and became one of the first companies to bring a distributed process control system to market.  
 
In 1983 Yokogawa merged with Hokushin Electric Works and, towards the end of the decade, entered the high-frequency measuring instrument business; in the 1990s, Yokogawa established an office in Bahrain to oversee its business in the Middle East and entered the confocal scanner and biotechnology businesses.  In 2026, Yokogawa was contracted to provide the control systems for the first Rolls-Royce SMR nuclear reactors.
 
And the Seiko Marvel?
In a 1957 Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry study comparing the quality of Japanese watches, Seiko's Marvel took seven of the top ten places, including the top five.  Even better, in 1958, it managed to take the top nine places.

That same year in the late 1950s, the Marvel was the first Japanese watch to win the men's wristwatch division of a contest held by the Japan branch of the American Horological Society, surpassing non-Japanese models such as the Omega.  The Marvel lived up to its name and helped earn Japanese timepieces a reputation for excellence that resounded all over the world, including as far as Switzerland.
 
The technology cultivated during the development of the Marvel became the base for the introduction of later mechanical watches, such as the Seiko Crown and Seiko Gyro Marvel, which overwhelmed the market with their further improved accuracy and advanced features.  It went on to become the engine that powered the development of the world's first successfully commercialized quartz watch.

This Seiko Marvel manual watch comes on a leather strap, and with nylon strap, springbar tool, and rugged travel case.