!44: A Short History of Development of the Wrist Watches

!±8± A Short History of Development of the Wrist Watches

Wrist watches are elegant, portable and convenient. They make life easier for those of us who have an obsession with keeping ahead of time and keeping up with the daily busy schedules. A wrist watch is quite possibly one of your best investments. Its development over the ages has been rapid, keeping in mind the progress in technological field. Breil watches are among top brands of the watches.

Patek Phillips made the first watch in 1868. In 1888, Louis Cartier developed the first ladies wrist watch with diamonds and sporting a gold bracelet. The stylised Santos-Dumont watch by Cartier gained great recognition, and by 1911, this type of watch was available for mass consumption in the market.

The earliest wrist watches were round shaped. However, as time went by, the watches started to diversify with Movado introducing the "Polypan" shaped watch. Patek Phillips introduced the rectangular shaped watch known as "clock reference n. 1593" to the market. The year 1913 saw many other watches being sold in the global market. More diverse shapes and sizes of watches started to be manufactured and put on sale for the masses.

As new manufacturers jumped into this exciting field, watches started getting rapid makeovers. Some watches were of course in more demand than others such as Constantin, Patek Phillipe and Cartier.

Movado made an army wrist watch with protective grid over the glass to give it greater strength, in 1912. And in 1914, the first alarm watch was introduced by Eterna.

However, with the advent of a new watch company, all others were left behind. Rolex debuted in the world of wrist watch making in 1920. Rolex came on the scene with its elegant "Rolex Prince" that made use of the "dual time" feature, a revolutionary move that allowed it great recognition. Its salient feature was the introduction of the "second sector" being larger than the "minute sector", something that had not been tried before. It was later followed by "Rolex Oyster", the first water resistant wrist watch.

The production of "Reverse" by Jaeger Le Coultre was also considered revolutionary since it could be turned to an angle of 180 within its case, in effect protecting the crystal and the dial.

John Hardwood invented the first automatic wrist watch in 1923. World War II saw even greater technologically advanced watches being manufactured. Omega had supplied both the British and American troops with wrist watches in World War I. This supply of wrist watches to troops was carried on by Hamilton, Omega and Breitling in 1946, during the war years.

1953 saw the manufacture of the first battery powered watch by Lips, whereas the first electric watch was produced by Hamilton in 1957. More innovations were to follow with the development of watches, for example, ones that displayed date on the watch face, were made out of stainless steel, had an LCD embedded in them and used the electric tuning fork to function.

All this and more is what wrist watches have as a proud history. Major innovations in this field may be accounted for by only a few big companies, but the credit goes to all the heads behind the development of ever-refined watches that we get to see currently.