The first attempts were inconclusive, the watches would go wrong after a week. Far from resembling the watches we wear today, they were designed to fit in pockets and had an egg-shaped shape, not a relatively flat disc that fits our wrists like they do today. These early watches were called the Nuremberg eggs , in keeping with the origins of its creator, Peter Henlein.
Gradually, as they flattened out, they took the name of pocket watches, the pocket being the name given to the pocket provided for this purpose. Join the adventure! DOn't miss out on our next launches and exclusive offers, subscribe:. Sign Up. These cookies allow us to collect information about how visitors use the Website, for example to count visitors and to see how visitors move around the Website. They record your visit to the Website, the pages you have visited and the links you have followed.
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They build a mechanism that provided great resistance when the spring was tightly wound. The gears were made of copper around This was a nice improvement, because the first parts were faulty. Copper is finer editing, making the clock more accurate. As you can imagine, this was a very expensive process involving many needlework. Therefore a watch was already a status symbol back then.
The next step in the history of the watch was made in by Englishman Robert Hooke and Dutchman Christiaan Huygens. They created separate from each other a structure where the spring ran balance wheel. Due to different knowledge sharing and many needlework, the watch was far enough developed in , that it was accurate enough for navigation.
The First World War had a profound influence on the history of the watch. Soldiers started to wear watches on the wrist, so they could read time more quickly in the heat of the battle. For example, different longitudinal locations elicit different shadow lengths and, as a result, different speeds at which the dial's shadow hand moves.
So, in order to consistently display the correct time, a sundial and its markings must remain stationary at all times. On an even more obvious note, sundials - by definition - don't work at night. To fill the gap in time-telling between when the sun sets and when it rises again, people began to tinker with alternative methods of measuring the passing of moments.
By BCE, candles which burned at a set documented rate were invented. At about the same time, the hourglass became a common time measurement device. Around BCE, water clocks - which worked in much the same way as the hourglass - became popular. It wasn't until CE that mechanical clocks began to replace their water counterparts.
Constructed of a series of pulleys, counterweights, and bells the word clock actually derives from the French for bell , mechanical clocks began to pop up all over the known world, but they were not any more accurate than the water clocks that they had replaced. They could lose a half an hour or more on any given day. And they stayed inaccurate until Galileo discovered the pendulum in Truth be told, Galileo didn't actually use his discovery to create a better clock.
It took a Dutch man named Christian Huygens to realize the implication of Galileo's discovery in , a whopping 63 years later. His mechanical clock, which only lost up to 15 seconds a day, was the world's first reasonably accurate clock. While the pendulum clock exploded in popularity, it was still too unwieldy to ever be considered even remotely portable. In , a German locksmith by the name of Peter Henlein invented the world's first portable pocket-sized clock.
It acquired the name watch from sailors who used it to replace the hourglasses they used to time their 4-hour shifts of duty, or watches. And the name has stuck ever since.
This egg-shaped design eventually evolved into the much more common flat pocket watch and, by , they had grown fashionable enough to become commonplace.
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