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The History of Watches at Gold Watch Buckle
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Watch
The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition
watch - small, portable timepiece usually designed to be worn on the wrist. Other kinds of timepieces are referred to as clocks. It was believed that the first watches were made in Nuremburg, Germany, c.1500. However, there is new evidence that watches may have appeared at an earlier date in Italy. Early watches were ornate, very heavy, and made in a variety of shapes, e.g., pears, skulls, and crosses; the faces were protected by metal latticework. Watch parts were made by hand until c.1850, when machine methods were introduced by watch parts manufacturers in the...
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Watch
ClocksOnly.com
The first watches were created in Italy around 1524 CE. The main problem for portable time keeping before the 1600s was the lack of driving power. Timepieces of that era were typically driven by weights making it very difficult for portable use. The inaccuracy of timepieces in this era were very common and most watches only had one hand that had to be wound at least twice a day.
It was not until 1675 CE that the implementation of a spiral balance spring changed timekeeping forever by taking timekeeping accuracy from fractions of an hour to fractions of a minute. It was then a second hand was added to the watch parts. At this time Roman numerals were added to mark the minutes. Eventually, due to rapid development, a watch would only have to be wound once a day instead of every twelve hours.
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The History and Evolution of the Wristwatch...
By John E. Brozek
© InfoQuest Publishing, Inc., 2004
International Watch Magazine, January 2004
Today, a wristwatch is considered as much of a status symbol as a device to tell time. In an age when cell phones and digital pagers display tiny quartz clocks, the mechanical wristwatch has slowly become less of an object of function and more a piece of modern culture.
Walk into the boardroom of any Fortune 500 company and you’re likely to see dozens of prestigious wristwatches, including such names as Rolex, Vacheron Constantin, Frank Müller, Jaeger-LeCoultre and even Patek Phillipe. However, this was not always the case. Less than 100 years ago, no self-respecting gentleman would be caught dead wearing a wristwatch. In those days of yore, real men carried pocket watches, with a gold half-hunter being the preferred status symbol of the time - no pun intended.
The established watchmaking community looked down on them as well. Because of their size, few believed wristlets could be made to achieve any level of accuracy, nor could they withstand the basic rigors of human activity. Therefore, very few companies produced them in quantity, with the vast majority of those being small ladies’ models, with delicate fixed wire or chain-link bracelets.
This all started to change in the nineteenth century, when soldiers discovered their usefulness during wartime situations. Pocket watches were clumsy to carry and thus difficult to operate while in combat. Therefore, soldiers fitted them into primitive "cupped" leather straps so they could be worn on the wrist, thereby freeing up their hands during battle. It is believed that Girard-Perregaux equipped the German Imperial Naval with similar pieces as early as the 1880s, which they wore on their wrists while synchronizing naval attacks, and firing artillery.
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A Short History of the Wristwatch
Author: James Ross
At the start of the last century the clocks that were available for men or women were firstly pocket clocks, and then clocks that held by a pendant attached to the lining of jackets or corsets. The advent of war, industrialization, and the development of the sport activities, brought over new trends which extended to not only the way we dressed, but also how we carried our clocks.
It is said that it was a nanny who invented wrist watches at around the end of the 19th century, who fixed a clock around her wrist by using a silk band. The first watches to be made were in fact smaller models of pocket clocks that were fitted with a leather strap. Once this product hit the market newer designs started to be produced based around this same concept.
It was Louis Cartier who first made the kind of watches we see today when he created a watch for a flying pioneer hero by the name Santos Dumont. By 1911 this same type of watch was on general sale. That same type of watch became the blueprint of what wrist watches look like to this day.
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