Preserving the Past, Valuing the Legacy – Uncover the Stories Behind History

From their humble origins as portable spring-driven clocks in the 15th century, the modern watch traces its history back to the 16th century in Europe. Mechanical watches were invented by engineers and innovators from the 16th century to the middle of the 20th century. They wound mainsprings, which operated gears, which moved the hands, and a balance wheel rotated to keep the time. The electric quartz watch, which used a vibrating quartz crystal to keep time and was invented in the 1960s, was a huge step forward for the watch making industry. The "quartz crisis" occurred in the 1980s, when quartz watches supplanted mechanical watches as the market leader. In 2020, quartz movements will power the great majority of timepieces, yet mechanical watches are still popular.

For whatever reason, town watchmen when used watches to keep track of their shifts, therefore one theory puts the word "watch" back into its original context as "watchman" in Old English. According to other explanation, the word originated with the sailors of the 17th century who employed these innovative tools to keep track of the duration of their shifts on board. As early as 1542, the word "watch" is mentioned in connection with a timepiece according to the Oxford English Dictionary.



Clock-watch

The first wristwatches and other wearable timepieces were manufactured in the 16th century in the German towns of Augsburg and Nuremberg, and they were somewhat smaller than modern watches. In the early 15th century, the mainspring was invented, allowing for the possibility of portable clocks. Many consider Peter Henlein, Henle, or Hele, a clockmaker from Nuremberg, Germany, who lived from 1485 to 1542, to be the man who invented the watch. One of the earliest German artisans, he created the first timepieces worn on the body—ornamental "clock-watches" worn as pendants. A phrase written by Johann Cochläus in 1511 is the foundation of his renown.

Even the most seasoned mathematicians can't help but be impressed by Peter Hele's efforts, yet he's still rather young. He fashions intricate clocks with multiple wheels from tiny iron pieces. These clocks can be worn on the breast or tucked into a purse and will chime the hours for forty hours without the need for weights.

There is no proof that Henlein was the first German clockmaker to produce small watches at this time; other clockmakers were.

They wore these "clock-watches" around their necks or attached them to their garments. Engraved and decorated, these massive drum-shaped cylindrical metal boxes were several inches in diameter. That was all they had: an hour hand. A hinged brass cover, typically ornamentally perforated with grillwork, would cover the face instead of glass, allowing one to read the time without opening the watch. Tapered pins and wedges held the iron or steel mechanism together until screws were adopted after 1550. Striking or alarm systems were incorporated into numerous motions. Twice daily wounding was the norm. In subsequent iterations, the shape became more spherical, and the eggs were dubbed Nuremberg eggs. Later in the century, there was a fad for clocks with unique shapes; examples included books, animals, fruits, stars, flowers, insects, crosses, and even skulls (Death's head watches).

People didn't actually wear these early clock-watches to tell time. Their verge and foliot motions were so inaccurate—with mistakes of maybe several hours daily—that they were essentially useless. Produced as adornment and novelty for the aristocracy, these timepieces were prized for their exquisite decoration, peculiar form, or fascinating mechanism; precise timekeeping was of uttermost significance.

Pocket watch

Men started carrying their timepieces in their pockets in the 17th century, a departure from the traditional practice of wearing them as pendants. Women continued to wear their watches as pendants far into the 20th century. It is reported that this happened in 1675 when waistcoats were introduced by Charles II of England. It wasn't a question of taste or bias; period watches were infamously vulnerable to fouling from weather exposure and could only be safely stored in a pocket. They eventually took on the characteristic shape of a pocket watch, which is flat and rounded with no sharp corners, so they could fit into more common pockets. Around the year 1610, people started covering their faces with glass. Watch fobs were introduced, with the term "fuppe" meaning "pocket" in German. 'Albert chain', an attachment invented later in the 1800s by Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, to connect the pocket watch to the man's outerwear. To wind and set the watch, one had to open the rear, attach a key to a square arbor, and spin it.

The verge escapement, first employed in clocks in the thirteenth century, drove a foliot—a bar fashioned like a dumbbell with weights attached to its ends—to oscillate back and forth, keeping the time. This mechanism was also utilized in early pocket watches.in [13] But unlike weight-powered clocks, the mainspring created a new kind of inaccuracy. A spring's force is not static but rather diminishes with unwinding. Early watches slowed down during their running period as the mainspring ran down because, although all timekeeping mechanisms are affected by variations in their drive force, the primitive verge and foliot mechanism was especially sensitive to these changes. This issue, known as lack of isochronism, has always been a difficulty for mechanical timepieces.

Prior to 1657, efforts to enhance the precision of timepieces centered around reducing the mainspring's steep torque curve. The stackfreed and the fusee were two early clock-watch devices that accomplished this. The stackfreed, a spring-loaded cam on the mainspring shaft, was removed after about one hundred years because to the excessive friction it introduced. A far more long-term solution was the fusee. The mainspring barrel was connected to a chain that altered the leverage as the spring unwound, resulting in an equalization of the drive force. The pulley was curved and conical in shape. By the early 19th century, fusees had become the de facto norm for all timepieces. Additionally, the balance wheel progressively supplanted the foliot because it provided superior timekeeping due to its larger moment of inertia.

Balance spring

The creation of the balance spring, which was contested by Robert Hooke and Christiaan Huygens at the time, and which was attached to the balance wheel in 1657, marked a significant improvement in precision. Before this, the balance wheel could only move in a back-and-forth motion due to the inertia of the wheel, which was applied by the escapement. Because of this, the period of the wheel was very responsive to changes in mainspring tension. The balance wheel became a harmonic oscillator thanks to the balance spring, and its inherent 'beat' is inherently resilient to external perturbations. The minute hand was added to watch faces in Britain around 1680 and France around 1700 as a result of this tremendously improved precision, which reduced inaccuracy from several hours per day to roughly ten minutes per day. An innovative wave that swept the watchmaking industry two centuries ago was set in motion when the balance wheel became more accurate, drawing attention to mistakes produced by other sections of the movement.

The escapement was the initial target for improvement. The cylinder escapement, first proposed by Thomas Tompion in 1695 and refined by George Graham in 1715, supplanted the verge escapement in high-quality timepieces. The duplex escapement, developed by Jean Baptiste Dutertre in 1724, was used by a handful of high-quality British watchmakers. The benefit of these escapements was that they only slightly pushed the balance wheel midway through its swing, so it remained 'separated' from the mechanism and could swing freely for the most of its cycle. Concurrently, technological advancements like Robert Hooke's tooth-cutting machine enabled a rise in the output of watches, albeit the finishing and assembly processes were still carried out by hand until the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Temperature compensation and chronometers

Watch mechanisms advanced rapidly due to the Enlightenment's perspective on watches as scientific instruments. Several innovations that would eventually find their way into watches were born out of this era's focus on precise marine chronometers, which were essential for celestial navigation in order to ascertain longitude while at sea. It was discovered that fluctuations in the elasticity of the balance spring with temperature changes were a significant source of mistake in balance wheel watches. Pierre Le Roy and Thomas Earnshaw developed a bimetallic temperature compensated balance wheel in 1765, which addressed this issue. The two bimetallic arms of this balancing wheel formed a semicircle. In order to counteract the slowness caused by the weaker balancing spring, the arms were gently bent inward as the temperature increased, which caused the balance wheel to spin quicker back and forth. Over the course of the following century, this technique found its way into more and more watches, eventually reducing temperature-induced error to a few seconds daily.

In 1760, Jean-Antoine Lépine devised the going barrel, which, when adopted in the 19th century, rendered the fusee obsolete by providing a more continuous driving force throughout the operating time of the watch. Astronomical timepieces and intricate pocket chronometers with multiple hands and functions were manufactured at this time.

Lever escapement

From around 1800 onwards, the lever escapement—introduced by Thomas Mudge in 1754 and refined by Josiah Emery in 1785—became widely used, primarily in Britain. Abraham-Louis Breguet also adopted it, but Swiss watchmakers—who were now the primary suppliers of watches to most of Europe—largely stuck with the cylinder until the 1860s. Nonetheless, the lever was incorporated into nearly every watch by the year 1900. This type of escapement worked by having the balance wheel swing through its center position, briefly pushing on a T-shaped "lever" that allowed the escape wheel to be released. Thanks to the lever's "locking" and "draw" features, the balance wheel could swing freely during the majority of its cycle. Its action was also quite precise, and it could restart itself if it was stopped by a jar.

During this time, high-quality timepieces began to use jewel bearings, which were brought to England in 1702 by the Swiss mathematician Nicolas Fatio de Duillier. Thinness is a defining feature of watches from this era. Watches could shrink to significantly smaller dimensions because to technological advancements like the cylinder and lever escapements. A change in style was prompted by this. Fat verge-movement pocketwatches were mockingly called "onions" and "turnips" because they were unfashionable and worn only by the impoverished.

Mass production

Georges-Auguste Leschot (1800–1884) was a trailblazer at Vacheron Constantin in Geneva when it came to the innovation of interchangeable machine tools for the clockmaking industry. His pupil Antoine Léchaud mass-produced his 1830 anchor escapement invention. In addition, he came up with a pantograph, which made it possible to standardize and interchange parts on watches of the same calibre to a certain extent.

For the better part of two centuries, the British dominated the watchmaking industry. However, they stuck to a production structure that catered to the wealthy and famous. In 1843, the British Watch Company tried to update clock production by using mass production methods and replicating equipment and technology. However, this approach really took off in the US. Aaron Lufkin Dennison established the Waltham Watch Company in 1861 after successfully running an interchangeable-parts business in Massachusetts since 1851.

In order to safely schedule trains, the railroads had very precise watch standards, which pushed for advances in accuracy. Around 1891, engineer Webb C. Ball created a method for inspecting railroad chronometers and the first criteria for precision. Jewel bearings were practically ubiquitous at this time, and temperature-compensated balance wheels were soon to be standard in most watches. Adjustments for isochronism and positioning inaccuracies in the balancing spring were implemented based on methods developed by Abraham-Louis Breguet, M. Phillips, and L. Lossier. At the International Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, there was the first ever international watch precision contest. The top four watches, which were chosen at random from the mass production line, were the most impressive of all the competitors. The exhibit also featured the first fully automatic screw-making machine. Thanks to these developments, high-quality watches could only be accurate to within a few seconds every day when calibrated correctly by 1900.

The Naugatuck Valley in Connecticut was dubbed the "Switzerland of America" because to the massive production of clocks by the American clock industry, which had dozens of enterprises based there. When it came to exports, especially to Europe, the Waterbury Clock Company was right up there with the biggest names in the industry. Timex Group USA, Inc., its successor, is now the sole watchmaker in the area.

Keyless winding, in which the crown is turned to wind the watch, superseded key winding around 1860. Some mass-produced watches utilized a simplified version of the duplex escapement developed by Daniel Buck in the 1870s, while others used the pin pallet escapement, an affordable variant of the lever escapement created by Georges Frederic Roskopf in 1876, which made watches affordable to ordinary workers for the first time.

Standardization in mechanical watch design, along with improvements in materials, tolerances, and manufacturing techniques, occurred throughout the twentieth century. The invention of low-thermal-coefficient alloys like invar and elinvar rendered the bimetallic temperature-compensated balance wheel obsolete. The complex temperature-compensated balance was superseded by an invar balance wheel with an elinvar spring because it was nearly insensitive to variations in temperature. Jewellery became more affordable once a method to create synthetic sapphire was found in 1903. Construction of bridges took precedence over 3/4 plate construction.

Wristwatch

Wristwatches were formerly reserved for ladies, while men wore pocket watches until the turn of the twentieth century. Production of the first watches dates all the way back to the 16th century, when the idea of a wristwatch first emerged. According to certain accounts, Abraham-Louis Breguet made the first wristwatch in 1810 for Queen Caroline Murat of Naples. The majority of watchmakers in the mid-nineteenth century made a variety of women's wristwatches, which were frequently sold as bracelets.

Longines was the first Swiss firm to manufacture timepieces in-house and the first watch trademark in the world when it was founded in 1832.

At the tail end of the nineteenth century, military men began to wear wristwatches as the significance of synchronizing actions during battle without possibly betraying the enemy's strategy became more apparent. When officers realized it would be impractical to use pocket watches during intense combat or while mounted on horses, they started strapping the watches on their wrists. Even though they were likely making comparable designs since the 1880s, the London-based Garstin Company patented a 'Watch Wristlet' in 1893. British army officers started wearing wristwatches in the 1880s, for use in colonial wars like the Anglo-Burma War in 1885.

As a result of the critical need to coordinate the deployment of troops and the timing of strikes against the nimble Boer rebels, wristwatches quickly became standard issue for officers during the Boer War. Mappin & Webb scaled up production during the Boer War a few years after starting production of their successful 'campaign watch' for soldiers during the fight at the Sudan in 1898.

At the turn of the twentieth century, makers started making wristwatches specifically for women and men, as opposed to the earlier versions, which were just regular pocketwatches attached to a leather strap. In 1903, the now-standard wire lugs were patented by the Swiss manufacturer Dimier Frères & Cie for use in wristwatches. An early Brazilian pilot named Alberto Santos-Dumont approached his friend, the French watchmaker Louis Cartier, in 1904 with the idea of creating a timepiece that would be practical for his flights. Joined by his brother-in-law Alfred Davis, Hans Wilsdorf relocated to London in 1905 to establish Wilsdorf & Davis, a firm that would later become Rolex, offering reasonably priced, high-quality watches. Wilsdorf engaged the Swiss business Aegler to manufacture a series of wristwatches because he was an early adopter of the timepiece. He won an award in 1914 from the Kew Observatory in London for his Rolex wristwatch, which was the first of its kind to achieve chronometer certification in Switzerland in 1910.

The public's view of a man's wristwatch underwent a sea change due to the effects of World War I, which paved the way for a massive market in the decades after the conflict. During the War, artillery gunners and infantrymen advancing behind a creeping barrage had to be in perfect sync with one another. Military timepieces made during the war had unbreakable glass and luminous displays to withstand the conditions of trench warfare. Like Santos-Dumont, military pilots discovered that wristwatches were more practical than pocket watches, proving that their use was just as critical in the air as it was on the ground. Wristwatches were distributed to soldiers by the British War Department starting in 1917.

A Cortébert wristwatch (1920s)

One of the first to take advantage of this opportunity was the Coventry-based company H. Williamson Ltd. The statement "...the public is buying the practical things of life" was made during the 1916 annual general meeting of the company. It would be dishonest for anyone to say that the watch is expensive. Anecdotal evidence suggests that one out of four soldiers currently sport a wristlet watch, with three more planning to do so in the near future. The British Horological Journal noted in 1917 that "...the wristlet watch was little used by the sterner sex before the war, but now is seen on the wrist of nearly every man in uniform and of many men in civilian attire." This trend quickly spread after demobilization, as nearly all enlisted men wore wristwatches by the end of the war. In 1930, there were fifty wristwatches for every one pocketwatch. In 1923, John Harwood created the first self-winding device that was effective. On Vostok 1, Yuri Gagarin wore the first wristwatch into space in 1961.

Electric watch

The 1950s saw the release of the first watches powered by electricity. They were able to keep time by means of a balance wheel that was driven by a solenoid, or in some more sophisticated watches that came before the quartz watch, by means of a steel tuning fork that vibrated at 360 Hz, driven by a solenoid that was driven by a transistor oscillator circuit. An old-fashioned wheel train still drove the hands. Standard features of mechanical watches included shockproof balancing pivots, break resistant 'white metal' mainsprings, and self-winding mechanisms. 'gem inflation' occurred as a result of the gem mania, and timepieces adorned with as many as one hundred jewels could be found on store shelves.

Quartz watch

The 'brain' behind the quartz revolution, Seiko's daughter company Epson, was tasked in 1959 by Seiko with designing a quartz wristwatch. The 59A code was assigned to the project. Throughout the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, Seiko's functional prototype of a pocket quartz watch served as the official timekeeper.

System of the Seiko Astron Quartz Watch (1969): On 25 December 1969, the Seiko 35 SQ Astron, the most accurate wristwatch in the world at the time, became the first quartz watch to go into production.[43] The technology behind quartz wristwatches was invented by a combination of Japanese, American, and Swiss minds, so no one could patent the entire mechanism. This opened the door for other manufacturers to join the quartz watch market, which was seeing tremendous expansion. The mechanical wristwatch legacy had its almost century-long reign come to an end with this, which occurred in a little over a decade.

An enormous leap forward in watch making technology occurred in 1969 with the debut of the quartz watch. A quartz crystal resonator, powered by a battery-operated oscillator circuit, vibrated at 8,192 Hz, replacing a balance wheel that oscillated at 5 Hz. The digital counters were utilized to convert the beats into seconds, minutes, and hours, instead of a wheel train. Thanks to the resonator's greater Q factor and quartz's low temperature coefficient, this watch outperformed the best mechanical ones in terms of accuracy. Plus, it was shock-resistant and never needed to be cleaned because there were no moving parts. In 1970, Pulsar created the oldest digital electronic watch with a light-emitting diode display. The first wristwatch to have Marine Chronometer certification was the Omega Marine Chronometer, which was released in 1974. It was accurate to within 12 seconds each year.

A Pulsar LED quartz watch (1976)

The frequency of the crystal utilized to maximize accuracy, albeit at the cost of power consumption. Thus, the accuracy of the first generation of timepieces was severely limited by their low frequencies, which were just a few kilohertz. The second generation's usage of energy-efficient CMOS electronics and LCDs prolonged the life of the battery and enabled an increase in the crystal frequency to 32,768 Hz, leading to an accuracy of 5-10 seconds every month. Mechanical watch sales have been steadily declining since the 1970s, when quartz watches began to displace them. In the watch business, this turmoil is known as the "quartz crisis" since it caused most watch manufacture to relocate to the Far East.

The Japanese company Miyota (Citizen Watch) debuted a brand-new movement in 2010. It boasts a second hand that sweeps smoothly instead of jumping, and it features an ultra-high frequency (262.144 kHz) quartz crystal that is supposedly accurate to +/- 10 seconds per year.

A quartz watch from Citizen Watch can now be accurate to within one second per year as of 2019. Using an AT-cut crystal that oscillates at 8.4 MHz (8,388,608 Hz) enhanced the accuracy. By checking for changes in frequency and temperature once each minute, the watch keeps its superior accuracy.

Radio-controlled wristwatch

It wasn't until 1991 when the Junghans Mega became the first radio-controlled analog wristwatch in the world.

The first radio-controlled wristwatch, the MEGA 1, was marketed by Junghans in 1990. A radio receiver inside the watch receives coded radio time signals broadcast by government-operated time stations like JJY, MSF, RBU, DCF77, and WWVB, which are used to set the quartz oscillator to the right time every day. This ensures that the watch maintains the same level of accuracy over time as the atomic clocks that regulate the signals. Newer types can pick up synchronization signals from all across the globe.

Atomic wristwatch

The first wristwatch to have an internal atomic clock was unveiled in 2013 by Bathys Hawaii with their Cesium 133 Atomic Watch. This watch has a small cesium atomic clock on a chip, as opposed to the radio watches mentioned earlier that get their atomic clock accuracy from quartz clock circuits that are adjusted by radio time signals received from government atomic clocks. It supposedly keeps the time to the nearest one second in a thousand years.

Starting in 2001, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)'s groundbreaking Chip Scale Atomic Clock (CSAC) program generated the first prototype atomic clock chip in 2005; this chip forms the basis of the watch. The production of the chips was initiated by Symmetricom in 2011. A 1 Hz clock signal is generated to power the hands, just like in previous cesium clocks, from an extremely exact 9.192631770 GHz microwave signal that is created when electrons shift between two extremely small energy levels in cesium atoms. The process of vaporizing liquid metal cesium from a small capsule is carried out on the chip. A photodetector is illuminated by an infrared laser beam that has been modified by a microwave oscillator. This beam passes through the capsule. Cesium atoms absorb light, lowering the photodetector's output, when the oscillator reaches the exact frequency of the transition. A phase-locked loop circuit uses the photodetector's output as feedback to maintain the oscillator's frequency. Coherent population trapping, which did away with the necessity for a large microwave cavity, was the game-changer that made it possible to reduce the size of a rack-sized cesium clock to a chip size.

John Patterson, CEO of Bathys, read about the chip and opted to build a watch around it. He used a Kickstarter campaign to fund the project. The watch is big and rectangular because of the enormous 1+1⁄2-inch chip. Recharging is required every thirty hours.

Smart watch

Wireless digital devices like smart watches can be used as cell phones, portable music players, and personal digital assistants. By the early 2010s, some had a processor and mobile operating system that could run mobile apps, like a Smartphone.

The first smart watch was Steve Mann's 1998 Linux Watch, introduced on February 7, 2000. Japanese Seiko introduced the Ruputer, a wristwatch computer with a 3.6 MHz CPU. Samsung introduced the first watch phone in 1999. This was the SPH-WP10. With a monochrome LCD screen, built-in speaker and mic, and protruding antenna, it had 90 minutes of talk time. IBM created a Linux-powered wristwatch prototype. The original version had 6 hours of battery life; the upgraded version has 12. IBM upgraded it with an accelerometer, vibrating mechanism, and fingerprint sensor. IBM and Citizen Watch created the Watch Pad. It ran Linux 2.4 on a 320x240 QVGA monochrome touch-sensitive display. Calendar software, Bluetooth, 8 MB RAM, and 16 MB flash memory were demonstrated. It cost $399 and targeted students and businesspeople. Fossil introduced the Wrist PDA, a Palm OS watch with 8 MB RAM, 4 MB flash memory, an integrated stylus, and 160x160 resolutions. It was withdrawn in 2005 due to its 108-gram weight.

Early 2004, Microsoft announced the SPOT smart watch. Coffee makers, weather stations, and clocks using SPOT technology were used to illustrate it. Through FM waves, the smart watch provided weather, news, stocks, and sports scores. It required a subscription. Sony Ericsson introduced the Sony Ericsson Live View, a wearable watch with BT for Android smart phones, in 2010.

The innovative smart watch Pebble collected 10.3 million dollars on Kick starter from April 12 to May 18, 2012. This watch had a Sharp 32mm 144x168 pixel black and white memory LCD with a backlight, vibrating motor, magnetometer, ambient light sensor, and three-axis accelerometer. Stone street One's Bluetopia + MFI software stack lets it talk with Android and iOS devices utilizing BT 2.1 and 4.0.

As of July 2013, Acer, Apple, BlackBerry, Foxconn, Google, LG, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sony, VESAG, and Toshiba made or developed smartwatches. HP, HTC, Lenovo, and Nokia stand out. Many smartwatches debuted during CES 2014. The phone had a 3G modem and curved AMOLED display. The Apple Watch was introduced on September 9, 2014, and released early 2015. First watch since SPOT in early 2004, Microsoft Band was a smart fitness tracker debuted in 2014.

Apple Watch Series 4 debuted at a September 2018 keynote. It included a bigger display and an EKG to identify cardiac abnormalities. Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 3100 the same month. It replaces the Wear 2100 with power efficiency and a low-power core that can operate basic watch functions including step tracking.