The Evolution of the Wristwatch

 By Bruce Shawkey

Found this interesting article in a 1950 Asia issue of Europa Star on the evolution of the wristwatch. The particular slant of the article provides a little different on the whole discussion of how wristwatches came to be the timekeeper of choice. Popular wisdom war as the major contributing factor, but this article cites the need for accuracy, citing the tendency for accuracy to be diminished as the parts of a watch's movement are decreased in size. The article also discusses the evolution of the wristwatch from a simple timekeeper, to one with complication, beginning with a second hand, calendar function, all the way to a chronograph. I have edited the article to make it more readable.

It is interesting to note that the wrist watch, invented in the early part of the 19th century, probably at the end of the 18th century, was completely forgotten and neglected for almost one hundred years, only to come into use again in 1906. From that date on, the wrist watch, made with a lever escapement and greatly improved through considerable progress in the manufacture of its mechanism, has enjoyed such extraordinary success that in less than twenty years it has attained first place in the family of watches. At the same time, this development has caused a considerable growth in the Swiss watchmaking industry. The wrist watch has not, however, reached the position which it now holds without a great deal of work and research. For several decades wrist watches stopped frequently and were poor timekeepers. But improvements in mechanical precision, in some cases accuracy to within 1/1000 of a millimeter resulted in improvements in accuracy. There is also the the improvement in the quality of the metals and other substances used in the construction of the movement. 

The Wrist Chronometer

 For several years the Swiss Chronometrical Obervatories at Neuchatel and Geneva and the British Observatory at Teddington have been receiving annually a certain number of wrist chronometers of an extraordinary degree of precision. Between 1923 and 1942, most optimistic forecasts of watchmakers have been surpassed. Some watches performed as well as plus or minus 0.14 seconds in variation per day. It must not, however, be deduced from these figures that wrist watches are capable of attaining a precision equal or even higher than that of pocket watches. 

Complicated Wrist Watches

Complicated wrist watches fall into four categories: 1. Watches with sweep second hand 2. Self-winding watches ("Automatics") 3. Watches with calendar and full date 4. Wrist chronographs. None of these mechanisms is of recent invention. The first two were applied to pocket watches during the second half of the 18th century, the third in the 19th century and the fourth, the chronographs, were invented in the middle of the 19th century.