History

The story most often told is that Peter Henlein of Nuremberg made the first watch in 1510. It is told by serious institutions: the Seiko Museum states that Henlein "made a cylindrical portable clock in 1510 and the clock operated for 40 hours".^{[Seiko Museum]} There is also a documentary trace from close to that date: a learned society's timeline records that in 1512 Cochlaeus noted that in Nuremberg "striking clocks were being made small enough to be worn in a purse or pouch", and referred to Peter Hele, that is, Henlein.^{[Antiquarian Horological Society]} So small Nuremberg clocks did exist, and Henlein was a real and noted maker.

The trouble is the object. The watch that carries the famous inscription ("Petrus Hele me f. Norimb. 1510") is in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, as inventory WI1265, and the museum is unusually candid about it. Its public object page dates the watch to "um 1530/80", says central components were added later, up to the 19th century, and gives the maker only as a South German clockmaker, with a question mark.^{[Germanisches Nationalmuseum]} It also notes that written maker's signatures are untypical for small clocks of the early sixteenth century, that the signature sits on a loosely attached lid that could easily have been lost, and that the inscription was cut over scratches already present on the surface.^{[Germanisches Nationalmuseum]}

What does survive, unambiguously, is a body of early portable clockwork with firm museum dates: a German watch movement fitted with a stackfreed, dated 1580–1600;^{[Science Museum]} a pendant watch with striking work from Augsburg, about 1620.^{[Deutsches Uhrenmuseum Furtwangen]} Dated objects like these, rather than any single origin story, are what the early record actually consists of.

The earliest answers were mechanical compensations. The fusee is a cone; the mainspring's chain winds onto it so that as the spring weakens, it pulls through a longer lever arm. The patent description is exact: the chain "winds progressively onto the barrel pulling on the fusee with a lever arm that continuously increases in size in order to compensate for the reduction in the force of the spring".^[patent] A learned society's timeline records the Jacob Zech clock of 1525 as the earliest dated clock with one.^{[Antiquarian Horological Society]} The stackfreed was a German alternative; the British Museum records of an Augsburg watch of 1610–1620 that it "was furnished with a stackfreed mechanism to aid better timekeeping".^{[British Museum]}

Neither fix addresses the deeper problem, which is that these watches had nothing that kept time. They had a wheel that oscillated, but nothing setting how fast. That changed with the balance spring: a fine spiral fixed at one end to the balance and at the other to the movement, giving the balance a natural period of its own. The Seiko Museum dates the working result to 1675, when Huygens "made the accurate clock driven by a balance spring and controlled by an escapement fitted to the balance".^{[Seiko Museum]}

One clarification worth making, because the two are often merged. Huygens' famous book, Horologium oscillatorium, Paris, 1673, is about the pendulum: how it "can be used to regulate the workings of a clock".^{[Smithsonian Libraries]} It is a different achievement, two years earlier, from the balance-spring timepiece of 1675, and a pendulum is no use at all to something you carry.

A ship can find its latitude from the sun. Longitude is harder, and it reduces to a timekeeping problem: as the Seiko Museum puts it, "if they could know the precise time, they would be able to measure their longitude".^{[Seiko Museum]} Carry a clock still showing your port's time, compare it with local noon, and the difference is your distance east or west. That requires a clock that keeps time on a moving, damp, temperature-swinging ship, which in 1714 nothing could do.

The British Parliament attached money to the problem. The Longitude Act of 1714 offered "a Reward, or Sum of Ten thousand Pounds, if it Determines the said Longitude to One Degree of a great Circle",^{[Royal Museums Greenwich]} rising "to Fifteen thousand Pounds, if it Determines the same to Two Thirds of that Distance",^{[Royal Museums Greenwich]} and to twenty thousand for half.

John Harrison spent his life on it. Royal Museums Greenwich, which holds the machines, records H1 as made in 1735: "the first relatively successful marine timekeeper of any kind", unveiled to acclaim in London^{[Royal Museums Greenwich]}, and describes how it sidesteps a ship's motion: the timekeeper "is unaffected by the motion of a ship owing to its two interconnected swinging balances".^{[Royal Museums Greenwich]} After H1's 1736 sea trial the Commissioners agreed on a payment of £500, half paid up front so Harrison could build a better one.^{[Royal Museums Greenwich]}

Three machines later he abandoned the approach entirely and made a watch. Work on H4 began in 1755 and it was completed in 1759; RMG notes that "with its very stable, high frequency balance, it proved the successful design".^{[Royal Museums Greenwich]} It was tried to Jamaica in 1761 and to Barbados in 1764, after which "it was confirmed that John Harrison's timekeeper had kept time within the most stringent limits of the 1714 Act".^{[Royal Museums Greenwich]} The Board recommended £10,000, and "the recommendations became law in the new Longitude Act of 10 May 1765".^{[Royal Museums Greenwich]}

Until the mid-nineteenth century a watch was fitted together by hand, part by part, each part made for that watch. The change came in Massachusetts. The Smithsonian's record for an 1852 prototype states that "the first firm to mass-produce watches by machine was the American Watch Company of Massachusetts",^{[Smithsonian]} and its record for a movement of about 1867 describes what that actually required: "they completely redesigned the watch so that its movement could be assembled from interchangeable parts made on special machines".^{[Smithsonian]} Redesigning the product to suit the machine, rather than mechanising the old design, is the whole of the idea.

It scaled fast. By 1880 the industry begun at Waltham "had ten firms making nearly three million watches a year".^{[Smithsonian]} Elgin was founded in 1864 expressly to compete with Waltham.^{[Smithsonian]} And the price fell far enough to change who owned a watch: Waltham's William Ellery model sold "for an unbelievable $13.00" and became a fad with Union soldiers,^{[Smithsonian]} accounting by 1865 for "almost 45 per cent of Waltham's unit sales".^{[Smithsonian]} The Seiko Museum records the competitive consequence: American mass producers "soundly defeated the Swiss at international exhibitions in Vienna in 1873 and Philadelphia in 1876".^{[Seiko Museum]}

Then it went cheaper still. The Waterbury Long Wind "sold for about $3.50, in contrast to the cheapest American-made watches at that time that would sell, cased, for between $8 and $20".^{[Smithsonian]} That enterprise failed in 1912, but others "would take up the manufacture of cheap reliable timepieces that came to be known as 'dollar' watches".^{[Smithsonian]}

Switzerland's answer was organisational rather than industrial. The Seiko Museum describes an industry of "small cottage factories" with specialist part-makers and separate assemblers who checked and fitted the components,^{[Seiko Museum]} and attributes its low prices to "shifting the factory work to farmers in the Jura Valley area as a side job, who worked for the lowest wages in Western Europe".^{[Seiko Museum]} Two towns were built around that trade so completely that UNESCO inscribed them as a World Heritage site in 2009^[UNESCO], planned in the early nineteenth century after extensive fires, and owing "their existence to this single industry",^[UNESCO] laid out in parallel strips where "residential housing and workshops are intermingled".^[UNESCO]

Before railways, towns kept their own local noon and the differences did not matter. Trains made them matter. Royal Museums Greenwich records that Greenwich Mean Time "was ultimately adopted across Great Britain by the Railway Clearing House in December 1847",^{[Royal Museums Greenwich]} that by the mid-1850s almost all British public clocks were set to it, and that "it finally became Britain's legal standard time in 1880".^{[Royal Museums Greenwich]} Distribution came by wire: in 1852 Greenwich "introduced equipment that transmitted accurate time signals throughout the country over the electric telegraph network".^{[Science Museum]}

In the United States the railroads moved first and the law followed much later: the US Naval Observatory records that "standard time in time zones was instituted in the U.S. and Canada by the railroads on 18 November 1883", and was not established in law until 1918.^{[US Naval Observatory]} The international settlement came in Washington in 1884, where the conference's own printed protocols record Mr Rutherfurd's resolution, offered at the session of 6 October, "that the Conference proposes to the Governments here represented the adoption of the meridian passing through the centre of the transit instrument at the Observatory of Greenwich as the standard meridian for longitude".^{[International Meridian Conference]} That draft was temporarily withdrawn and the wording the conference adopted speaks of the initial meridian rather than the standard one: a distinction worth keeping, since the phrasing quoted above is the proposal, not the outcome. RMG gives the reason as practical: "nearly two-thirds of the world's ships were already using charts based on the Greenwich Meridian".^{[Royal Museums Greenwich]}

Railway timekeeping also produced a much-repeated origin story for American railroad watch standards, involving an 1891 collision at Kipton, Ohio. That story could not be traced to any Tier 1 source here. What the Smithsonian does record is earlier and different: after "a horrific fatal accident on the Providence & Worcester Railroad in August 1853, caused in part by the inaccuracy of a conductor's watch", New England railroads tightened running rules and ordered better clocks and watches for staff.^{[Smithsonian]}

The wristwatch is recent. The Smithsonian's record for an Elgin wristwatch of about 1917 notes that "wristwatches are relative newcomers among timekeepers", dating the modern form to around 1880.^{[Smithsonian]} For decades it was women's jewellery: the NAWCC's museum text records that "although the wristwatch was initially an ornamental piece of jewelry for women, military personnel recognized the practicality of the timepiece, and helped make it an acceptable timepiece for everyone".^{[NAWCC National Watch & Clock Museu]}

The Smithsonian makes the mechanism of that change explicit, and it is not a flattering one for the men involved: "the practicality of having time at a glance, the feature that attracted active women to the style in the first place, changed military men's minds about wristwatches".^{[Smithsonian]} The Seiko Museum places the first battlefield wear earlier than the usual date, with British soldiers in the Second Boer War of 1899–1902.^{[Seiko Museum]} Objects show the transition physically: a Science Museum record documents a pocket watch that "had lugs attached to its case at 12 and 6, so that a strap could be attached to the back of it".^{[Science Museum]}

Then the proportions flipped. The NAWCC records that in 1920 about 25 per cent of Swiss watch exports were wristwatches and 75 per cent pocket watches; by 1934 wristwatches were 65 per cent.^{[NAWCC National Watch & Clock Museu]}

Accuracy, meanwhile, had become a public competition. Neuchâtel Observatory "was established in 1858 to guard the benefits reaped by the timepiece industry in Neuchatel Province", with the first chronometer tests in 1860;^{[Seiko Museum]} Geneva's competition began in 1872.^{[Seiko Museum]} It is worth knowing what those results described, though. The Seiko Museum notes that the standards were very hard to meet with commercially sold watches, so makers "designed prototypes, adjusted them especially for the tests, and entrusted them to the observatory".^{[Seiko Museum]} An observatory result was evidence about a specially prepared instrument, not about the watch in a shop.