History of watches

[2][need quotation to verify] Another theory surmises that the term came from 17th-century sailors, who used the new mechanisms to time the length of their shipboard watches (duty shifts).

[4] The first timepieces to be worn, made in the 16th century beginning in the German cities of Nuremberg and Augsburg, were transitional in size between clocks and watches.

His fame is based on a passage by Johann Cochläus in 1511,[8][9] Peter Hele, still a young man, fashions works which even the most learned mathematicians admire.

They were made as jewelry and novelties for the nobility, valued for their fine ornamentation, unusual shape, or intriguing mechanism, and accurate timekeeping was of very minor importance.

[12] This was not just a matter of fashion or prejudice; watches of the time were notoriously prone to fouling from exposure to the elements, and could only reliably be kept safe from harm if carried securely in the pocket.

Later in the 1800s Prince Albert, the consort to Queen Victoria, introduced the 'Albert chain' accessory, designed to secure the pocket watch to the man's outergarment by way of a clip.

The timekeeping mechanism in these early pocket watches was the same one used in clocks, invented in the 13th century; the verge escapement which drove a foliot, a dumbbell shaped bar with weights on the ends, to oscillate back and forth.

A curving conical pulley with a chain wrapped around it attached to the mainspring barrel, it changed the leverage as the spring unwound, equalizing the drive force.

[15] The increased accuracy of the balance wheel focused attention on errors caused by other parts of the movement, igniting a two century wave of watchmaking innovation.

During the same period, improvements in manufacturing such as the tooth-cutting machine devised by Robert Hooke allowed some increase in the volume of watch production, although finishing and assembling was still done by hand until well into the 19th century.

The development during this period of accurate marine chronometers required in celestial navigation to determine longitude during sea voyages produced many technological advances that were later used in watches.

This problem was solved by the bimetallic temperature compensated balance wheel invented in 1765 by Pierre Le Roy and improved by Thomas Earnshaw.

This system, which could reduce temperature induced error to a few seconds per day, gradually began to be used in watches over the next hundred years.

The going barrel invented in 1760 by Jean-Antoine Lépine provided a more constant drive force over the watch's running period, and its adoption in the 19th century made the fusee obsolete.

The lever escapement, invented by Thomas Mudge in 1754[18] and improved by Josiah Emery in 1785, gradually came into use from about 1800 onwards, chiefly in Britain; it was also adopted by Abraham-Louis Breguet, but Swiss watchmakers (who by now were the chief suppliers of watches to most of Europe) mostly adhered to the cylinder until the 1860s.

Jewel bearings, introduced in England in 1702 by the Swiss mathematician Nicolas Fatio de Duillier,[19] also came into use for quality watches during this period.

The thick pocketwatches based on the verge movement went out of fashion and were only worn by the poor, and were derisively referred to as "onions" and "turnips".

[21] Although there was an attempt to modernise clock manufacture with mass production techniques and the application of duplicating tools and machinery by the British Watch Company in 1843, it was in the United States that this system took off.

Aaron Lufkin Dennison started a factory in 1851 in Massachusetts that used interchangeable parts, and by 1861 was running a successful enterprise incorporated as the Waltham Watch Company.

The engineer Webb C. Ball, established around 1891 the first precision standards and a reliable timepiece inspection system for Railroad chronometers.

Techniques for adjusting the balance spring for isochronism and positional errors discovered by Abraham-Louis Breguet, M. Phillips, and L. Lossier were adopted.

[33] Wristwatches were first worn by military men towards the end of the nineteenth century, when the importance of synchronizing maneuvers during war without potentially revealing the plan to the enemy through signaling was increasingly recognized.

In 1904, Alberto Santos-Dumont, an early Brazilian aviator, asked his friend, a French watchmaker called Louis Cartier, to design a watch that could be useful during his flights.

His Rolex wristwatch of 1910 became the first such watch to receive certification as a chronometer in Switzerland and it went on to win an award in 1914 from Kew Observatory in London.

[38] The impact of the First World War dramatically shifted public perceptions on the propriety of the man's wristwatch, and opened up a mass market in the post-war era.

Service watches produced during the War were specially designed for the rigours of trench warfare, with luminous dials and unbreakable glass.

[42] The first quartz watch to enter production was the Seiko 35 SQ Astron, which hit the shelves on 25 December 1969, which was the world's most accurate wristwatch to date.

In 2010, Miyota (Citizen Watch) of Japan introduced a movement based on an expired patent by Seiko that uses a type of quartz crystal with ultra-high frequency (262.144 kHz) which is claimed to be accurate to +/- 10 seconds a year.

The breakthrough that allowed a rack-sized cesium clock to be shrunk small enough to fit on a chip was a technique called coherent population trapping, which eliminated the need for a bulky microwave cavity.

[63] This watch had a 32 millimeter 144x168 pixel black and white memory LCD manufactured by Sharp with a backlight, a vibrating motor, a magnetometer, an ambient light sensor, and a three-axis accelerometer.