Early Wristwatches

 By Bruce Shawkey

Browsing through the Library of Congress's vast archive of books online, I found an interesting book on the history of timekeeping, from caveman days to dawn of the wristwatch. The book was published in 1919 as the nations were involved, to one degree another, in WWI. The author, Harry Chase Brearley (1870-1940), was active/lived in New York. The book was conceived and sponsored by the Ingersoll Family as a celebration of their then 25 years of watchmaking. They commissioned Brearley to write the book based on his reputation as a fairly well known writer, with several non-fiction books to his credit. The book was published by Doubleday.

 The final chapter deals with dawn of the wristwatch. Excerpts and illustrations follow.

Many a soldier waited in the darkness
for the perilous moment to go "over the
top" with his eyes fixed upon the luminous
hands and figures of his Ingersoll Radiolite.

Then came the World War, and the wristwatch which had been often ridiculed as effeminate (although it is hard to explain why, since it was first adopted as an obvious convenience in the Army and on the hunting field — two of the most masculine spheres of activity it would be possible to imagine) was seen at once to be the most easy means of knowing the time in actual warfare. Millions of watches, consequently, were strapped to wrists of soldiers and sailors, and the obvious advantages of the luminous dial placed it in enormous demand.

Factory facilities producing an average of twenty thousand accurate watches a day; distribution facilities including the cooperation of a voluntary "chain-store system of more than one hundred thousand independent retailers, all operating upon a common plan and under common prices; a product that has come into the most wide-spread use not only throughout the United States but in the farthest regions of the inhabited earth — which has, in fact, in itself served to turn back the tide by which watches formerly flowed from Europe into America, so that it now proceeds from our shores toward those of Europe and other lands; a name which has become as well known as any in commercial and industrial life, and better than all, the appreciable raising of the efficiency of the human race through universally promoting the watch-carrying habit and putting fifty million timepieces into service.

The wristwatch on the bottom is Swiss, maker not specified, but very typical of early wristwatches.