Most watches now tick quartz; luxury still winds springs
A watch is a personal timepiece built to keep steady time while you move—on a wrist strap or otherwise. From the sixteenth century, mechanical watches wound mainsprings and counted swings of a balance wheel. Today ordinary timekeeping is usually quartz, while collectible pieces often stay mechanical with tourbillons and moon phases.
The first wearable timepieces, halfway in size between clocks and watches, came from Nuremberg and Augsburg in the 16th century. Nuremberg's Peter Henlein often gets the credit, though other German makers were building miniature clocks at the time and nothing proves he came first. Pocket carrying became common only in the 17th century. The name may come from Old English woecce, a watchman, since town guards timed their shifts with them, or from sailors timing duty watches aboard ship.
Accuracy jumped in 1657 when a spring was added to the balance wheel, an invention Robert Hooke and Christiaan Huygens fought over; daily error fell from hours to about ten minutes, and minute hands appeared in Britain around 1680. Thomas Tompion's cylinder escapement of 1695, Pierre Le Roy's temperature-compensated balance of 1765 and Thomas Mudge's lever escapement of 1754 followed, the last spreading only after 1800. Britain led production in the 17th and 18th centuries but catered to the elite, while Aaron Dennison's Massachusetts factory, founded in 1851 on interchangeable parts, became the Waltham Watch Company. Keyless winding arrived through patents by Thomas Prest in 1820, Adolphe Nicole in 1844 and Jean-Adrien Philippe, whose crown system dates from 1842.
Wristwatches are as old as the idea: Robert Dudley gave Elizabeth I an arm watch in 1571, and the oldest survivor was made in 1806 for Joséphine. For a century they were women's items, partly because women's clothes lacked pockets. Soldiers adopted them to synchronise manoeuvres, from colonial campaigns in the 1880s to the First World War, when creeping barrages demanded split-second timing and the War Office began issuing them in 1917. Louis Cartier built one in 1904 so Alberto Santos-Dumont could keep both hands on his airship controls, and Hans Wilsdorf's firm became Rolex in 1915.
John Harwood made self-winding practical in 1923, Hamilton's electric 500 appeared in January 1957, and quartz, invented in the 1960s, conquered most of the market by the 1980s, devastating Swiss makers. A Patek Philippe Grandmaster Chime fetched a record 31.2 million dollars at auction.
Source: Watch
