Keeping time is a relatively recent obsession of humankind, but it has ancient roots in Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations. The earliest dated evidence on record for this is a piece of an Egyptian sundial from circa 1500 B.C., which suggests rudimentary attempts to keep time likely go back much further than that. Since the sundial relies entirely on the sun to keep time, developments in timekeeping came with improved technology over centuries of intellectual development. Today, time is seemingly inescapable, perhaps best illustrated by the remarkable evolution of the personal timepiece: the watch. The watch is as ubiquitous today as any accessory and yet has come to represent more than mere fashion. Our lives are run whether consciously or unconsciously by precise schedules that are maintained by omnipresent indicators of time, from clocks on the wall to watches on the wrist...and, increasingly, to cell phones in our pockets, a sort of modern multifunctional incarnation of the pocket watch. A description of the history of counting time is given by Jo Ellen Barnett: “The watches on our wrists today are the culmination of a long, slow, arduous process of invention and discovery which ultimately began about four millennia ago when someone stuck a stick in the ground and watched its shadow change throughout the day” (1998).

Natural Time and Early Methods for Tracking Time

Every four years, the occurrence of a leap year reminds us that a day is not precisely twenty-four hours. In fact, while the roughly twenty-four-hour day seems constant, the earth’s rotation and gravitational pull relative to the moon is constantly shifting and, as a result, the day will continue to get longer, reaching twenty-five hours in about 225 million years. To be sure, watchmakers need not panic. But the point is that there is a “planetary basis of our day” that is largely a consequence of chance “planetesimal” encounters occurring some 4.6 billion years ago (Barnett 1998). Our closest neighbor, Mars, has a rotation rate similar to Earth’s at 24.6 hours while Venus, as an example, actually takes longer to rotate on its axis than it does to orbit the sun, meaning that sunrises and sunsets are not a very useful way to keep time. On Earth, however, each new dawn brought another reliable cycle and the perceived rising of the sun allowed for early recognition of day parts as the sun traveled across the sky and cast different lengths of shadows, a phenomenon recorded on latitude-specific sundials.

While wealthy Romans carried around pocket-sized sundials, they cannot be understood as predecessors of the modern watch. It would take developments in measuring hours without the sun, such as water clocks, sand glasses, and candles uniformly burning away the hours to begin to measure time in the increments understood today...and even then the adoption of Egyptian and Mesopotamian cycles of numeric values was somewhat arbitrary. All of these methods for tracking time were utilized in the East, particularly in China by the age of the Sung dynasty of A.D. 960-1279, and certainly well in advance of the West (Barnett 1998). Despite its more advanced culture, it appears that China had less use for the kind of accurate timekeeping that came to rule the West, because of unique understanding of the earth’s rhythms and a different relationship to nature (Glasmeier 2000). Even today there remain enduring calendars from other cultures, from the Chinese to the Muslims to the Mayans, all with different ways of understanding time. The Christian calendar, however, has become the international standard in global relations, and its origins are in the time-disciplined prayer practices of early Middle Age Christians. A system of regular worship combined with the business of merchants and industry to create a feeling of regimented time that would soon be rationalized into the first mechanical clocks in the late thirteenth century. Thus, the field of horology (the art and science of measuring time and making timepieces) was born (Barnett 1998).

Regulated Mechanical Time and the Emergence of the Watch

The first mechanical clock likely emerged out of monasteries, developed by monks as alarm mechanisms to ring the bells according to their regular and regimented hours of worship. Once the twenty-four equal-hour day was developed (almost arbitrarily from the Egyptian twenty-four hour day and the sexagesimal (base 60) number system of the Mesopotamians), the chiming of the bells gradually fell in line with the clock. Early clocks, both the large tower and turret clocks and the smaller models that they were based on, were propelled by weight mechanisms. By the fifteenth century, however, the mainspring was developed, employing the stored power of a tightly coiled spring, and it was soon followed by a device called the fusee, which equalized the momentum of the spring as it uncoiled. Smaller versions of this mechanism lead to the invention of the watch, at one time attributed to Peter Henlein of Nuremberg in the sixteenth century. There is, however, written evidence and a couple of physical examples of earlier use of the diminutive mainspring (Barnett 1998).

Early watches were bulky and ornate and, like the early spring-powered clocks, kept time with only an hour hand (though still rather inaccurately due to errors in friction). Nevertheless, watches created a demand for clock makers, and so the profession took off and an extensive market developed by the seventeenth century. After the equal-hour sundial was developed, the drive to develop more accurate methods for keeping time resulted in the pendulum and anchor escapement devices which were based on physics principles discovered by Galileo. Time became connected to the earth’s rotation rather than the perceived “real” time indicated by the sun, which was compounded by too many variables to keep changing mechanical clocks to match the time. Out of these differences an equation of time was developed that would later become one of many potential “complications” featured in handmade mechanical watches.

The Watch Manufacturing Industry

The earliest manufacturing dominance in the watch industry was by the British, who were the most urbanized people in the eighteenth century. The factory systems emerging out of the industrial revolution and the development of the railroad combined to give birth to a consciousness inextricably linked to clock time (Barnett 1998). The small-scale manufacture of watches in the early eighteenth century was a dual system of production that combined craftspeople in the metalworking industry putting out product from their workshops to be acquired and assembled in factory systems, eventually at the rate of a couple hundred thousand watches a year. The strategy, however, proved to be short-lived in light of more integrated approaches to manufacturing and poor transportation and communication among participants in the British industry. For example, a formalized pool of skilled labor in watchmaking was never created, so it remained a small-scale industry that quickly began to decline with the introduction of cheaper Swiss-made products even as global demand for watches increased.

In contrast to Britain, Switzerland established a geographically centralized industry with an unparalleled competitiveness and willingness to learn from their competitors that catapulted the Swiss to the top of the industry in the nineteenth century. Early watch makers who got their start in repairs began to communicate and trade with French innovators in the industry. Already adept at manufacturing parts, the Swiss developed these new ideas to establish the foundations for their watch industry--an industry that began to thrive when competition between the French and the British ate up resources within those countries (Glasmeier 2000). Mechanical innovation and determination eventually centralized watch making in the mountainous Jura region of Switzerland--located on a crucial trade route among Germany, France, and Italy--as well as specialized workshops in Neuchâtel. Because of centralization, the focus on quality and precision, and the resulting reputation that emerged, the Swiss would dominate the market for more than 150 years, and though the country remains largely synonymous with quality today, much of their share of the market, particularly in the low-to-medium price range, has slipped to foreign competitors.

Meanwhile, the American watchmaking industry also began to emerge as watchmakers with experience in repairs began to experiment with their own handmade watches, building upon the knowledge of the British and, to some extent, the Swiss. American roots in the industry are in the early nineteenth century, but wouldn’t mature until the middle of the century. As the machine tool industry developed, so too did watchmakers, and early firms began to prove themselves in high-end watches before moving into the high-quality yet inexpensive watch market. This market specialized in pocket watches for men and wristwatches for women. But during World War I, wristwatches were more practical in battle and consequently became more fashionable than pocket watches for men after the war (Korda 2004)). The economic isolation of America during the Civil War was the perfect arena for watchmakers to take control of the domestic market and introduce affordable watches, eventually producing some two million watches a year by the 1880s. Part of this success must be attributed to George Roskopf, who developed an inexpensive pin-lever mechanism in Switzerland that would become a standard device in the industry of the United States (Glasmeier 2000). Both the American and the Swiss industries would be adversely impacted by World War I, and though the Swiss would recover to an extent, a new competitor emerged in the Japanese, who would take the ambitions of the industry in the twentieth century to a whole new level.

Twentieth-Century Innovations and the New Industry Leader

The defining factor of the twentieth-century technological pursuit in watchmaking was precision. Watches have always evolved constantly with respect to trends in fashion, but the mechanics of the standard spring-powered device itself had undergone few changes in three hundred years until the advent of electronics in the middle of the twentieth century. En route to the quartz analog, which the Japanese correctly identified as the future of watchmaking, were three important innovations in watch movement, beginning with the electric watch. First, the mechanics of the watch remained partially intact, though a balance-wheel motor powered by a battery replaced the mainspring transfer of energy stored in the spring coil. A more profound impact occurred as a result of the battery-powered tuning fork: the current caused the fork to vibrate 31 million times a day, and though quite fragile, was far more accurate than a mechanical watch. Both technologies emerged commercially throughout the world by the 1960s. Finally, the most significant innovation was the use of quartz crystals for high frequency vibration to power either a tuning fork or a stepping motor, and allowed for innovation in the display as new digital displays emerged in the form of light-emitting diodes and liquid crystal display. The latter would come to dominate the digital display industry, but only capture a small share of the watch market (Glasmeier 2000).

Since precision in watchmaking was the driving force behind innovation, it is easy to understand how an accurate watch that could be made cheaply would come to dominate the market. Electronic watchmaking has early precedent in a clock patented in 1845 that achieved electrical power supply and impulse through a combination of the pendulum and magnets. Gradually, improvements to battery technology and the miniaturization of batteries and additional components combined with quartz technology and integrated circuit technology to produce the most accurate timepieces ever assembled (Cutmore 1989). The Japanese were particularly adept at developing quartz technology and, building upon early knowledge gained in part from American industries, they developed large vertically integrated factories for watchmaking like Seiko, Citizen, and Casio. These firms quickly controlled their protected domestic market and within a major export-driven economy in the middle of the century built foundations in manufacturing that have helped them survive to the present day. All the major watch producers utilized Hong Kong as a cheap source of labor for assembling products as well as purchasing components for watches, but the Japanese were the best at controlling their distribution channels. Moving into the future, as Hong Kong’s labor force has changed with their recent autonomy, production has moved to the Chinese mainland, where some predict the watchmaking industry of the future will set up shop (Glasmeier 2000).

Watchmaking Beyond Time and Technology

Watches are not, however, limited to mere time keeping. Of all the ways to divide time, the seconds, minutes, and hours are potentially only one function of a watch. Anything else came to be called “complications” in watchmaking. As an example, perpetual calendars have been built into watches for more than two centuries. Such calendars have included everything from days and months to phases of the moon and adjustments for leap years. Modern technology, especially inexpensive batteries and microchips, allow for such “minor” complications in even cheaper watches, but such details required extensive mechanical skill in the past. The technical skill of handmade watches, particularly wristwatches, with further complications such as chronographs, seasons, orbits, and chimes, is astonishing and, for watchmakers, something of a fetish.

In spite of modern technological advances, some watchmakers such as the Swiss firm Patek Philippe continue to prove themselves with mechanical masterpieces composed of hundreds of handmade parts and the record breaking thirty-three complications, all integrated to the internal movement of the watch (Korda 2004). Total output of watches by manufacturers has increased from about 375,000 pieces a year early in the nineteenth century to over half a billion at the turn of the millennium. And Americans, as an example, are buying up hundreds of thousands of watches every single day for the sake of fashion, collecting and, of course, time (Barnett 1998). Meanwhile, time continues to be measured in increasingly precise manners, and so the evolution of the personal timepiece seems destined to continue into eternity.

Barnett, Jo Ellen. 1998. Time's Pendulum: The Quest to Capture Time—From Sundials to Atomic Clocks. New York, NY: Plenum Trade.

Cutmore, M. 1989. Watches: 1850-1980. Newton Abbot, England: David & Charles Publishers.

Glasmeier, Amy K. 2000. Manufacturing Time: Global Competition in the Watch Industry, 1795-2000. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.