Another classic accessory from the past 100 years is passing into history as technology replaces its function with something slicker and with more functionality. At least for the near future they will remain as collector items and novelties, but it cannot be long before they become as rare as a camera that uses film.I am talking about the wrist watch.
Watches, which are, of course, just miniature clocks, were first developed in the early 16th century, or maybe a little earlier. The idea of being able to carry around a little miniature clock tower in your pocket must have been a challenge and a
novelty. At first these watches/clocks were very crude, and kept bad time. Most did not have a minute hand, but only a hand to denote the hour, and could be as much as fifteen minutes off time, but since these timepieces belonged mainly to the wealthy and the nobility, they did not have to keep good time. They were decorative novelties.The face was not covered with glass, but usually had a hinged brass cover, often decoratively pierced with grillwork so the time could be read without opening it. The movement was made of iron or steel and held together with tapered pins and wedges, until screws began to be used after 1550. Many of the movements included striking or alarm mechanisms. They usually had to be wound twice a day. The shape later evolved into a rounded form; these were called Nurnberg eggs. Still later in the century there was a trend for unusually shaped watches, and clock-watches shaped like books, animals, fruit, stars, flowers, insects, crosses, and even skulls (Death's head watches) were made.
The Earl of Leicester’s New Year’s gift in 1571-2 to Queen Elizabeth of England was a diamond-and-ruby-set watch, on a bracelet, one of the first appearances of a "wrist watch," though it would not be called that until the turn of the 20th century. Small watches were usually worn on chains, or ribbons, or had pinning mechanisms so that they could be affixed to clothing like brooches.
In the late 16th century watches were occasionally worn in unnecessary multitudes: Marie d’Medici, (1575-1642) dressed with a half-dozen pinned all over her dress, once unpinned a pair of watches from her gown and gave them as a gift to the Venetian Ambassador. By 1622, in Blois, watches were made small enough to serve as earrings, and others were made into a series of three-quarter inch watches to be worn as buttons.
As watches became more sophisticated technologically, and thus more reliable, they became useful for the middle class businessman to be able to keep a more rigorous schedule. No doubt the watches were more expensive at first, but the price dropped as the demand grew. Germany , Switzerland and the Netherlands were known for their watch-making- but the common man in the 17th century, Puritan or no, would not want a highly decorated watch that was pinned on or worn around the neck, which would be too easy to steal on a city street, and thus was the simple, plain pocket watch born, rounded, with a glass or metal cover to keep the dial hands from snagging to slowing down time. In the 1670s, Charles II of England introduced the vest to fashion, which had a pocket for a “pocket watch,” and that became the common custom for men into the 20th century.
It took until the 19th century for the wristwatch technology to come to fruition. The wristwatch was invented by Patek Philippe. From the time of its invention until world war one, the wristwatch was mainly considered something that a woman would wear. In 1904, Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos Dumont asked his friend Louis Cartier to come up with an alternative that would allow him to keep both hands on the controls while timing his performances during flight. Cartier and his master watchmaker, Edmond Jaeger, soon came up with the first prototype for a man's wristwatch called the Santos wristwatch. The Santos first went on sale in 1911, the date of Cartier's first production of wristwatches. During the First World War soldiers needed access to their watches while their hands were full. They were given wristwatches, called 'trench watches', which were made with pocket watch movements, so they were large and bulky and had the crown at the 12 o'clock position like pocket watches. When the war ended, the soldiers got to keep their army issued wristwatches. They must have gotten used to wearing a wristwatch everyday, because soon after the war ended, it became common to see civilian men wearing wristwatches in public. After the war pocket watches went out of fashion and by 1930 the ratio of wrist-to-pocket watches was 50 to 1.
Many people, men and women, wore wrist watches in the 20th century. Some watches were heirlooms, given at graduation or other rites of passage- other watches were more decorative and fun and as interchangeable on women as bracelets. In the 1970s there was a huge craze for so-called digital watches, which told you the exact time in number form, instead of the “old-fashioned” analog form, which is deduced by judging the time on a circular face with the minute and hour hands, just like wall clocks. It is still a rite of passage for young children to learn to be able to tell the time from analog clocks- we learn it about the same time as we learn to read. While digital watches have not gone the way of the dinosaur, analog watches returned in the 1980s in a big way, and are still the most common form of wristwatch.
In the 1990s, however, with the invention of the hand held, mobile/cellular phone, the tolls of doom started to peel for wristwatches. After all, the mobile phone not only could be used to talk to someone else, but they always came equipped with a digital time piece, somewhere, and though at first it was common to carry both a phone in your purse and a watch on your wrist, over time the watch is gradually losing its place. Like landline telephones, why duplicate what you already have? Right now I have a favorite Fossil watch in my bag, but it is one of the fashionable kinds of watches from a few years ago that were so big that it is heavy to wear and so I only carry it to use it as a remote clock in class to make sure I give the students their proper break and exit times.
Today my iPhone not only lets me call people, but it also lets me send text messages to them, as well as emails. I can get on the Internet and download stuff as I need to. With my iPhone apps I can find out the weather, where I am geographically (as if I did not already know, most of the time), dance to a techno dance station, put on the news radio, and connect me with like-minded individuals around the world for socializing and dates. I can download the mobile version of Women’s Wear Daily and get the latest fashion scoops. I even have two of my favorite movies on there that I can watch whenever I want. Oh, and it tells the time, too, and can act like a travel alarm clock, buzzing me to wake up like old digital watch used to do. The iPhone isn’t as comfortable for calling as previous phones I have had and it is shaped like a small can of sardines, but it has supplanted my wrist watch for most things. If it didn’t shut off every 5 seconds to save power I might also use it in class, but I don’t. Yet.
I still have a collection of cool wrist watches, from the Waltham watch I got for graduating high school , inscribed with my name and dates, to the really cool Keith Haring watch I bought at Macy’s in 1985.
I could be wrong, but I do not expect I will ever buy another wristwatch, and I am sure I am not alone.
Costa, Alan, The History of Watches, http://www.clocksonly.com/watch_history.html
Wikipedia History of watches, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_watches
History of Wristwatches, http://www.lussori.com/watch-history.html
Antique Pocket Watches, http://antiqwatch.com/
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