Jewelry & Watches

A watch is a small portable timepiece or clock that displays the time and sometimes the day, date, month and year. In past centuries, these often took the form of pocket watches, which today are seldom carried or worn. more...

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In modern usage, watch is usually a contraction of wristwatch, a designation for the most popular style of timekeeping device worn on the wrist.

Because most watches lack a striking mechanism, such as a bell or gong to announce the passage of time, they are properly designated as timepieces, rather than clocks.

Overview

Today, the most common type of watch is the wristwatch, worn on the wrist and fastened with a watch strap or watchband, a bracelet made of real or synthetic leather, metal, nylon, or even ceramic. Before the inexpensive miniaturization that became possible in the 20th century, most watches were pocket watches, which had covers and were carried separately, often in a pocket and attached to a watch chain.

Most inexpensive and medium-priced watches used mainly for timekeeping are electronic watches with quartz movements, powered by electricity. Expensive, collectible watches valued more for their workmanship and aesthetic appeal than for simple timekeeping often have purely mechanical movements and are powered by springs, even though mechanical movements are many times less accurate than quartz movements. The most accurate watches have radio-controlled movements that are miniaturized, portable versions of radio clocks (q.v.).

Watch cases

Pocket timepieces

The earliest need for portability in timekeeping was navigation and mapping in the 15th century. The latitude could be measured by looking at the stars, but the only way a ship could measure its longitude was by comparing the midday (high noon) time of the local longitude to that of a European meridian (usually Paris or Greenwich)—a time kept on a shipboard clock. However, the process was notoriously unreliable until the introduction of John Harrison's chronometer. For that reason, most maps from the 15th century through the 19th century have precise latitudes but distorted longitudes.

The first reasonably accurate mechanical clocks measured time with weighted pendulums, which are useless at sea or in watches. The invention of a spring mechanism was crucial for portable clocks. In Tudor England, the development of “pocket-clockes” was enabled through the development of reliable springs and escapement mechanisms, which allowed clockmakers to compress a timekeeping device into a small, portable compartment.

In 1524, Peter Henlein created the first pocket watch. It is rumoured that Henry VIII (the portrait of Henry VIII at this link shows the medallion thought to be the back of his watch) had a pocket clock which he kept on a chain around his neck. However, these watches only had an hour hand—a minute hand would have been useless considering the inaccuracy of the watch mechanism. Eventually, miniaturization of these spring-based designs allowed for accurate portable timepieces which worked well even at sea.

Read more at Wikipedia.org