A Short History of the Wristwatch

Word Count:

708

Summary:

Portable clocks were firstly carried in pockets and then worn with pendants. Changes in the way we lived our lives brought about the birth of the wrist watch. This article chronicles both how the wrist watch came tobe, as well as recounting the famous watch makers, the watches they made famous and what makes these watches so collectible.

Keywords:

antique, antique watches, watches, collecting, collecting watches

Article Body:

Over the centuries clocks have been used as a status symbol by those who wear

them. Their precision, elegance and convenience are just some of the attributes

that clocks and watches represent. Often they are bought purely for their

aesthetic looks. And at other times they are bought because of their technical

attributes like being precise to the last second or even millisecond. This is

what makes clocks and watches so collectible and in some cases they can command

high sums of money.

Whether you collect the new high precision watches or ones that come from a past

era, the fact is that over the years this hobby has become a high turnover

business. And collecting watches is in a lot of circles regarded as a wise form

of investing.

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 pendent attached to

the lining of jackets or corsets. The advent of war, industrialization, and the

development of the sport activities, brought over new tends which extended to

not only the way we dressed, but also how we carried our clocks.

It is said that it was s 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 lesther strap. Once this product hit the market newer designs

started to be produced based around this same cancept.

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.

Soon after the design of wrist "clocks" began to diversify away from the

classical round shape that had been in vogue up until that time. From the

Cartier classical wrist watch other makes of watch started to emerge which were

characterized by their shape. Movado is the perfect example of thesenew designs

when it came out with the "Polyplan" shaped watch. Then came the famously and

cryptically called "clock reference n.1593" by Patek Philippe which was a

rectangular shaped watch.

From 1913 onwards more and more watches started to be developed in all shapes

and styles. From the "gondola" watch of Patek Phillipe to Louis Cartiers'

"Tank"; named thus because it was inspired by the shape of English armored cars

of the time. These are watches which are very much sought after. There were

other numerous watch makers like Audemars Piguet, Vacheron Constantin who along

with Patek Philippe and Cartier came out with many other designs which added

other features to the watches like lunar phases, month and day most of which are

found in modern watches now.

Of course we could not mention wrist watches without mentioning the most famous

of them all: the Rolex watch. In the 1920s Rolex debuted in the world of wrist

watches with the elegant Rolex Prince and its revolutionary "dual time" feature

made famous for having the "seconds sector" larger than that of the minutes. At

the same time Jaeger Le Coultre produced an even more advanced piece called the

"Reverse", also very revolutionary in that it could be turn 180 degrees within

its case, thus protecting the crystal and dial. It became incredibly popular and

was only prevented from achieving even greater success by the recession of the

1930s and the advent of world war 2.

These early watches of the 1910s are what define all the makes of

watches that we see and wear today. This short article has only scratched the

surface of what is a very vast subject which has many more watch makers with

diverse and revolutionary designs. However it is makers like Rolex, Cartier,

Jaeger Le Coultre and the others mentioned that are amongst the most valuable

and collectible, and should you ever be so lucky to get one then make sure you

hang on to it - preferably to your wrist.