Watch

A watch is a portable timepiece intended to be carried or worn by a person. It is designed to keep a consistent movement despite the motions caused by the person’s activities. Watches evolved from portable spring-driven clocks, which first appeared in 15th-century Europe. In the 1960s the electronic quartz watch was invented, which was powered by a battery and kept time with a vibrating quartz crystal. By the 1980s the quartz watch had taken over most of the market.

About Watch in brief

Summary Watch A watch is a portable timepiece intended to be carried or worn by a person. It is designed to keep a consistent movement despite the motions caused by the person’s activities. Watches evolved from portable spring-driven clocks, which first appeared in 15th-century Europe. In the 1960s the electronic quartz watch was invented, which was powered by a battery and kept time with a vibrating quartz crystal. By the 1980s the quartz watch had taken over most of the market from the mechanical watch. Developments in the 2010s include smartwatches, which are elaborate computer-like electronic devices designed to be worn on a wrist. As of 2018, the most expensive watch ever sold at auction was the Patek Philippe Henry Graves Supercomplication, which is the world’s most complicated mechanical watch until 1989, fetching USD 24 million in Geneva on 11 November 2014. The most expensive timepiece ever sold is the Patesk Philippe Grandmaster Chime Ref. 6300A-010, which will fetch USD 31. 19 million at auction on 9 November 2019. The study of timekeeping is known as horology, and the word ‘watch’ came from the Old English word woecce – which meant ‘watchman’ – because town watchmen used the technology to keep track of their shifts at work. In general, modern watches often display the day, date, month, and year. For mechanical watches, various extra features called ‘complications’, such as moon-phase displays and the different types of tourbillon, are sometimes included.

Most electronic quartz watches, on the other hand, include time-related features such as timers, chronographs and alarm functions. Some modern watches even incorporate calculators, GPS and Bluetooth technology or have heart-rate monitoring capabilities, and some of them use radio clock technology to regularly correct the time. The lever escapement, the single most important technological breakthrough of the 17th and 18th centuries, was invented by Thomas Earnshaw in 1765 and improved by Pierre Le Le Le. Le Le improved the accuracy of the balance wheel, reducing error from perhaps several hours per day to perhaps 10 minutes per day, resulting in the addition of the minute hand to the face from around 1680 in Britain and around 1700 in France. The first thing to be improved was the escapements, invented in quality watches by Thomas Tompion in 1695 and further developed by George Graham in 1720s. Improvements in manufacturing – such as the tooth-cutting machine devised by Robert Hooke – allowed some watch production to increase until well into the 19th century, although the volume of finishing and assembling was still done by hand until the late 1800s. A major cause of error in balance-wheel timepieces, caused by changes in elasticity of the spring from temperature, was solved by the ballic-compensated balance wheel invented in 1759 by Josiah Emery in Britain, only gradually came into use from 1800.