Timeline of the Watch
Portable timepieces, from spring-driven clock-watches in early 16th-century Nuremberg through the balance spring, the lever escapement and American mass production to the wristwatch, the quartz crisis, Swatch and the Apple Watch.
- Category
- Engineering & Technology
- Events
- 30 events early 16th century – 2019
- Generated
- by claude-opus-5-5
early 16th century: Nuremberg locksmiths make portable spring-driven clocks
Peter Henlein, a Nuremberg locksmith, is traditionally credited with making some of the first portable timepieces driven by a coiled mainspring, small drum-shaped clock-watches worn on a chain or carried. Watches attributed to him, including a pomander watch dated 1505, are disputed, and other German and Italian makers produced similar pieces around the same time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Henlein1675: Huygens publishes the balance spring
Christiaan Huygens announced a spiral spring attached to a watch's balance wheel, which gave the balance a natural period of oscillation and greatly reduced the daily error of pocket watches. Robert Hooke claimed earlier priority for a spring-regulated balance, and the dispute was never settled.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_spring1704: Fatio and the Debaufres patent jewel bearings
Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, with the French watchmakers Peter and Jacob Debaufre, received an English patent for drilling pierced jewels to serve as low-friction bearings for watch pivots. Jeweled movements remained largely British for decades, and synthetic ruby later made jewel bearings cheap enough for ordinary watches.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewel_bearing~1754: Mudge invents the detached lever escapement
London watchmaker Thomas Mudge devised the detached lever escapement, which leaves the balance free to swing for most of its arc and so reduces interference with timekeeping. Little used at first, it was refined in England and Switzerland in the 19th century and became the escapement of almost all mechanical watches.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lever_escapement1761: Harrison's H4 sea watch is tested at sea
John Harrison's H4, a large watch about 13 centimeters across completed in 1759, was carried on a voyage from England to Jamaica beginning in November 1761 and kept time closely enough to determine longitude at sea. After further trials and disputes with the Board of Longitude, Parliament granted Harrison £8,750 in 1773.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison~1777: Perrelet develops a self-winding watch
Abraham-Louis Perrelet of Le Locle, in the Principality of Neuchâtel, is credited with a pocket watch wound by a weight that moved as the wearer walked, though the exact date and design are uncertain. Hubert Sarton in Liège described a rotor-type winding mechanism to the French Academy of Sciences in 1778.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham-Louis_Perrelet1801: Breguet patents the tourbillon
Abraham-Louis Breguet, a Neuchâtel-born watchmaker working in Paris, received a French patent on June 26 for the tourbillon, a rotating carriage that turns the escapement and balance continuously to average out timing errors caused by gravity when a pocket watch stays in one position. In 1808 Breguet fitted one of his first tourbillons into a movement by his late friend, the English watchmaker John Arnold, as a tribute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourbillon1810: Breguet begins a wristwatch for the Queen of Naples
Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples and sister of Napoleon, ordered a watch on a bracelet from Abraham-Louis Breguet, delivered in 1812 and often cited as the first wristwatch. Earlier bracelet timepieces are recorded, including an "armed watch" given to Elizabeth I by Robert Dudley in 1571, and wrist-worn watches long remained mainly women's jewelry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham-Louis_Breguet1845: Adrien Philippe patents crown winding and setting
Adrien Philippe, a French watchmaker who later partnered with Antoni Patek in Geneva, patented a sliding-pinion mechanism that wound a watch and set its hands through the crown and stem, eliminating the separate key. Earlier keyless systems by Thomas Prest and the house of Breguet had seen little use, but keyless winding became standard on pocket watches by the late 19th century, and Patek Philippe took its name in 1851.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patek_Philippe1850: Dennison and Howard start machine-made watch production
Aaron Lufkin Dennison and Edward Howard began making watches in Roxbury, Massachusetts, with machine tools and interchangeable parts adapted from armory practice, moving to Waltham in 1854. The firm, later the Waltham Watch Company, became one of the first to mass-produce watches in large numbers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waltham_Watch_Company1876: Swiss delegates study American watchmaking in Philadelphia
At the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Swiss visitors including Longines engineer Jacques David saw Waltham's automated production and reported that American factories could make good watches more cheaply than Swiss workshops. The reports pushed Swiss makers toward factory mechanization in the following decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Exposition1891: Kipton wreck leads to railroad watch standards
A collision of two trains at Kipton, Ohio, on April 19, blamed on a conductor's watch that had stopped for four minutes and then restarted, led railroads to hire jeweler Webb C. Ball to set standards. Railroad-grade watches had to meet requirements for accuracy, adjustment and regular inspection, and the rules spread across North American railroads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_chronometer1896: Ingersoll sells the dollar watch
Robert H. Ingersoll's company began selling the "Yankee" pocket watch, made by the Waterbury Clock Company, for one dollar. Cheap, robust pin-lever watches of this kind put a timepiece within reach of most American workers, and Ingersoll sold millions in the following decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_watch1904: Cartier makes a wristwatch for Santos-Dumont
Louis Cartier designed a square wristwatch on a leather strap for the Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont, who wanted to read the time without taking his hands off his aircraft's controls. Cartier sold the Santos design to the public from 1911, one of the first wristwatches marketed to men.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Santos-Dumont1914 – 1918: Soldiers in World War I adopt the wristwatch
Officers coordinating artillery barrages and attacks found pocket watches impractical, and "trench watches", often pocket movements with soldered wire lugs and protective grilles, became standard kit. After the war the wristwatch spread among men in civilian life, and by the 1930s wristwatches had overtaken pocket watches in many markets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trench_watch1926: Rolex patents the waterproof Oyster case
Hans Wilsdorf's Rolex patented the Oyster case, with a screw-down crown and caseback sealed against water and dust. In 1927 Mercedes Gleitze wore one while attempting to swim the English Channel, and Rolex advertised the watch's survival in a full-page newspaper advertisement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolex1931: Rolex introduces the Perpetual rotor
Rolex patented a self-winding wristwatch movement with a semicircular weight that rotated freely through 360 degrees, winding the mainspring as the wearer's wrist moved. It followed John Harwood's hammer-type automatic wristwatch of the 1920s, and the rotor design became the basis of most later automatic watches.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_watch1953: Blancpain and Rolex launch modern diving watches
Blancpain's Fifty Fathoms, developed with French navy combat divers, and the Rolex Submariner appeared in 1953 and 1954 with water resistance to roughly 90 to 100 meters and rotating bezels for timing dives. Their features shaped the diving watch, later codified in the International Organization for Standardization's ISO 6425 standard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_watch1957: Hamilton sells the first battery-powered watch
The Hamilton Watch Company of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, launched the Electric 500 on January 3, a wristwatch whose balance wheel was driven by a battery-powered coil rather than a mainspring. Its electrical contacts proved unreliable, but it was the first electric wristwatch sold to the public.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_Watch_Company1960: Bulova launches the Accutron tuning-fork watch
Bulova's Accutron, designed by the Swiss engineer Max Hetzel, used a battery-driven tuning fork vibrating 360 times per second in place of a balance wheel and was guaranteed accurate to a minute a month. Its electronic timing made it a precursor of quartz watches, and NASA used Accutron movements in spacecraft instruments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulova1969: Seiko sells the first quartz wristwatch
Seiko released the Astron in Tokyo on December 25, the first quartz wristwatch sold, keeping time from a quartz crystal oscillating at 8,192 hertz. The Swiss Centre Electronique Horloger had shown quartz prototypes at the Neuchâtel Observatory trials in 1967, and its Beta 21 movement went on sale in 1970.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astron_(wristwatch)1969: Omega Speedmaster is worn on the Moon
Buzz Aldrin wore an Omega Speedmaster Professional chronograph on the lunar surface during Apollo 11 in July, after NASA had qualified the manual-wind watch for spaceflight in 1965 following tests of several brands. Zenith, Seiko and a Heuer-Breitling group were introducing the first automatic chronographs at the same time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Speedmaster1970: Hamilton announces the Pulsar digital watch
Hamilton announced the Pulsar, an electronic wristwatch with a red light-emitting diode (LED) display lit by pressing a button, and began selling an 18-karat gold version in 1972. Cheaper LED and then liquid-crystal display (LCD) watches from American and Japanese electronics firms followed within a few years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsar_(watch)1970s – 1980s: Quartz watches undercut Swiss mechanical watchmaking
As Japanese and Hong Kong makers mass-produced inexpensive quartz watches, the Swiss industry, slow to abandon mechanical movements, lost much of its world market share. Employment in Swiss watchmaking fell by roughly two-thirds between 1970 and the mid-1980s, and hundreds of firms closed or merged.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_crisis1983: Swatch launches a low-cost Swiss quartz watch
Launched on March 1 in Zurich, the plastic Swatch had about 51 parts, with the movement mounted directly in the case to allow automated assembly. Its maker grew out of the 1983 merger of Switzerland's two largest watch groups, later led by Nicolas Hayek and renamed the Swatch Group in 1998, and the Swatch helped restore Swiss watch production.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch1983: Casio introduces the shock-resistant G-Shock
Casio engineer Kikuo Ibe developed the G-Shock, a resin-cased digital watch with a suspended module designed to survive a 10-meter drop, released in April. Its toughness found buyers among workers, soldiers and athletes, and it grew into one of Casio's largest product lines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-Shock1990: Junghans sells a radio-controlled wristwatch
The German maker Junghans introduced the Mega, widely cited as the first radio-controlled wristwatch, which set itself by receiving time signals from the DCF77 transmitter near Frankfurt. Radio-synchronized watches later spread to Japanese brands using signals from Germany, Japan, the United States and China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junghans_Mega2012: Pebble smartwatch raises record crowdfunding
Pebble Technology's e-paper smartwatch, which displayed notifications from a paired phone, raised about $10.3 million on Kickstarter in April and May, then a record for the site. Pebble sold over a million watches before Fitbit bought its intellectual property in 2016.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_(watch)2015: Apple Watch goes on sale
Apple's first smartwatch, announced in September 2014, went on sale on April 24, combining notifications, apps and fitness tracking with a heart-rate sensor. Later models added cellular connectivity, electrocardiogram (ECG) readings and fall detection, making it the best-selling smartwatch line by industry estimates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Watch2019: Apple Watch shipments exceed the Swiss watch industry
The research firm Strategy Analytics estimated that Apple shipped about 30.7 million watches in 2019, against about 21.1 million for the entire Swiss watch industry. Swiss export value nonetheless kept growing on higher-priced mechanical watches, reaching a record in 2023.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartwatch