Chess clock
[2] Invented by Thomas Bright Wilson of Manchester Chess Club, the clocks were first used during competition at the London 1883 tournament.
They have also been used in some legal settings where each side or party is allotted a specific amount of time for arguments.
[5] Analog clocks are equipped with a "flag" that falls to indicate the exact moment the player's time has expired.
[6] Typical of most inventions, it was crude compared to the products on the market many years later and was limited by the technology that existed at the time.
For example, the display was implemented via red LEDs, which required significant power and, as a result, the clock had to be plugged into a wall outlet.
The high cost of LEDs at the time meant that only one set of digits could be displayed: that of the player whose turn it was to move.
Being plugged into the wall is obviously a major drawback, but had one advantage: the timebase for the clock was driven off a rectified version of the alternating current mains frequency.
The first commercially available digital chess clock was patented in 1975 by Joseph Meshi and Jeffrey R. Ponsor.
Three years later a much-improved Micromate-180 was produced alongside Meshi's MBA thesis, "Demand Analysis for a New Product (The Digital Chess Clock)", at San Diego State University, while Meshi and Ponsor continued to develop digital gaming.
[9] Digital clocks and Internet gaming have spurred a wave of experimentation with more varied and complex time controls than the traditional standards.
Fischer's digital clock gave each player a fixed period of time at the start of the game and then added a small amount after each move.
Other aspects of Fischer's patent, such as a synthesized voice announcing how much time the players have, thus eliminating the need for them to keep looking at the clock, have not been adopted.
[10] On March 10, 1994, a patent application was filed by inventors Frank A. Camaratta Jr. of Huntsville, Alabama, and William Goichberg of Salisbury Mills, New York, for a game timer especially suitable for playing the game of chess, which employed a (simple) "delay" feature.
A particularly popular variant is blitz chess, in which each player is given a short time, such as five minutes, on the clock in which to play the entire game.
This ensures that the main time left on the clock can never increase even if a player makes fast moves.
The opening moves in chess are often played quickly due to their familiarity, which leaves the players more time to consider more complex and unfamiliar positions later.
