Watches
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Wikipedia-Article "Watches"
In naval parlance, watches are a timekeeping convention. The term in general use can mean any period of duty or responsibility, such as a hurricane watch.
A watch is a small portable clock that displays the time and sometimes the day, date, month and year. In modern times they are usually worn on the wrist with a watch-strap (made of e.g. leather (often synthetic), metal, or nylon), although before the 20th century most were pocket watches, which had covers and were carried separately, often in a pocket, and hooked to a watch chain.
Current watches are often digital watches, using a piezoelectric crystal, usually quartz, as an oscillator (see quartz clock).
Mechanical timepieces are still used, usually powered by a spring wound regularly by the user, e.g. a stem winder. The invention of "Automatic" or "Self-Winding" watches allowed for a constant winding without special action from the wearer: it works by an eccentric weight, called a winding rotor, that rotates to the movement of the wearer's body. The back-and-forth motion of the winding rotor couples to a ratchet to automatically wind the watch.
Watches may be collectible; they are often made of precious metals, and can be considered an article of jewelry.
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Types of watch
Pocket clock
The earliest need for portability in time keeping was navigation and mapping in the 15th century. The latitude could be measured by looking at the stars, but the only way a ship could measure its longitude was by comparing timezones; by comparing the midday time of the local longitude to a European meridian (usually Paris or Greenwich), a sailor could know how far he was from home. However, the process was notoriously unreliable until the introduction of John Harrison's chronometer. For that reason, most maps from the 15th century to c.1800 have precise latitudes but distorted longitudes.
The first reasonably accurate mechanical clocks measured time with weighted pendulums, which are useless at sea or in watches. The invention of a spring mechanism was crucial for portable clocks. In Tudor England, the development of "pocket-clockes" was enabled through the development of reliable springs and escapement mechanisms, which allowed clockmakers to compress a timekeeping device into a small, portable compartment. In 1524, Peter Henlein created the first pocket watch[1][2]. It is rumoured that Henry VIII (the portrait of Henry VIII at this link shows the medallion thought to be the back of his watch) had a pocket clock which he kept on a chain around his neck. However, these watches only had an hour hand - a minute hand would have been useless considering the inaccuracy of the watch mechanism. Eventually, miniaturization of these spring-based designs allowed for accurate portable timepieces which worked well even at sea. Aaron Lufkin Dennison founded Waltham Watch Company in 1850, which was the pioneer of the industrial manufacturing by interchangeable parts, the American System of Watch Manufacturing.
Wrist watch
The wristwatch was invented by Patek Philippe at the end of the 19th century. It was however considered a woman's accessory. It was not until the beginning of the 20th century that the Brazilian inventor Alberto Santos-Dumont, who had difficulty checking the time while in his first aircraft (Dumont was working on the invention of the aeroplane), asked his friend Louis Cartier for a watch he could use more easily. Cartier gave him a leather-band wristwatch from which Dumont never separated. Being a popular figure in Paris, Cartier was soon able to sell these watches to other men. During the First World War, officers in all armies soon discovered that in battlefield situations, quickly glancing at a watch on their wrist was far more convenient than fumbling in their jacket pockets for an old-fashioned pocket watch. In addition, as increasing numbers of officers were killed in the early stages of the war, NCOs promoted to replace them often did not have pocket watches (traditionally a middle-class item out of the reach of ordinary working-class soldiers), and so relied on the army to provide them with timekeepers. As the scale of battles increased, artillery and infantry officers were required to synchronize watches in order to conduct attacks at precise moments, whilst artillery officers were in need of a large number of accurate timekeepers for rangefinding and gunnery. Army contractors began to issue reliable, cheap, mass-produced wristwatches which were ideal for these purposes. When the war ended, demobilized European and American officers were allowed to keep their wristwatches, helping to popularize the items amongst middle-class Western civilian culture. Today, many Westerners wear watches on their wrist, a direct result of the First World War.
Complicated watch
A complicated watch has one or more functionalities beyond basic time-keeping capabilities; such a functionality is called a complication. Two popular complications are the chronograph complication, which is the ability of the watch movement to function as a stopwatch, and the moonphase complication, which is a display of the lunar phase. Among watch enthusiasts, complicated watches are especially collectible.
Chronographs and chronometers
The similar-sounding terms chronograph and chronometer are often confused, although they mean altogether different things. A chronograph is a type of complication, as explained under the heading "Complicated Watch." A chronometer is a watch or clock whose movement has been tested and certified to operate within a certain standard of accuracy by the COSC (Contrôle Officiel Suisse des Chronomètres). The concepts are different but not mutually exclusive; a watch can be a chronograph, a chronometer, both, or neither.
Electromechanical watches
The first use of electrical power in watches was as a source of energy to replace the mainspring, and therefore to remove the need for winding. The first battery-powered watch, the Hamilton Electric 500, was released in 1957 by the Hamilton Watch Company of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Quartz analog watch
The quartz analog watch is an electronic watch that uses a piezoelectric quartz crystal as its timing element, coupled to a mechanical movement that drives the hands. The first prototypes were made by the CEH research laboratory in Switzerland in 1962. The first quartz watch to enter production was the Seiko 35 SQ Astron, which appeared in 1969. There are also several variations of the quartz watch as to what actually powers the movement. There are solar powered, kinetically powered, battery powered and other less common power sources. Solar powered quartz watches are powered by available light. Kinetic powered quartz watches make use of the motion of the wearer's arm turning a rotating weight, which in turn, turns a generator to supply power. A seldom used power source is temperature difference between the wearer's arm and the surrounding environment (as applied in the Citizen Eco Drive Thermo). The most common power source is the battery. Watch batteries come in many forms, the most common of which are silver oxide and lithium.
Digital watches
Cheaper electronics permitted the popularization of the digital watch (an electronic watch with a numerical, rather than analog, display) in the second half of the 20th century. They were seen as the great new thing. Douglas Adams, in the introduction of his novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, would say that humans were 'so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea'.
The first digital watch, a Pulsar prototype in 1970, was developed jointly by Hamilton Watch Company and Electro-Data. A retail version of the Pulsar was put on sale in 1972. It had a red light-emitting diode (LED) display. LED displays were soon superseded by liquid crystal displays (LCDs), which used less battery power. The first LCD watch with a six-digit LCD was the 1973 Seiko 06LC, although various forms of early LCD watches with a four-digit display were marketed as early as 1972 including the 1972 Gruen Teletime LCD Watch [3], [4].
In addition to the function of a timepiece, digital watches can have additional functions like a chronograph, calculator, video game, etc.
Digital watches have not replaced analog watches, despite their greater reliability and lower cost. In fact, because digital watches are so cheap, analog watches are often worn as status symbols. For others, analog watches are just easier to read.
Fashionable watches
At the end of the 20th century, Swiss watch makers were seeing their sales go down as analog clocks were considered obsolete. They joined forces with designers from many countries to reinvent the Swiss watch.
The result was that they could considerably reduce the pieces and production time of an analog watch. In fact it was so cheap that if a watch broke it would be cheaper to throw it away and buy a new one than to repair it. They founded the Swiss Watch company (Swatch) and called graphic designers to redesign a new annual collection.
This is often used as a case study in design schools to demonstrate the commercial potential of industrial and graphic design.
Advanced watches
In 1990 radio controlled wristwatches or as they are sometimes called "atomic watches" reached the market. These wristwatches normally receive a radio signal from one of the national atomic clock facilities around the world, for example the National Institute of Standards and Technology located in Colorado in the United States. This radio signal tells the wristwatch exactly what time it is, in theory precise to a fraction of a nanosecond. It will also reset itself when daylight savings time changes. In recent years, mass production has meant that atomic watches have become as cheap as quartz watches, though market share still remains small as interest from big manufacturers is limited.
Other technological enhancements to wristwatches have been explored but most of them remained unnoticed. In 2005 for example, a company has put into market an alarm wristwatch with an accelerometer inside that monitors the user's sleep and rings during one of his almost-awake phases.
A number of functionalities non directly related to time have also been inserted into watches. As miniaturized electronics become cheaper, watches have been developed containing calculators, video games, digital cameras, keydrives, GPS receivers and cellular phones. In the early 1980s Seiko marketed a watch with a television receiver in it, although at the time television receivers were too bulky to fit in a wristwatch, and the actual receiver and its power source were in a book-sized box with a cable that ran to the wristwatch. In the early 2000s, a self-contained wristwatch television receiver came on the market, with a strong enough power source to provide one hour of viewing.
These watches have not had sustained long-term sales success. As well as awkward user interfaces due to the tiny screens and buttons possible in a wearable package, and in some cases short battery life, the functionality available has not generally proven sufficiently compelling to attract buyers. Such watches have also had the reputation as ugly and thus mainly geek toys. Now with the ubiquity of the mobile phone in many countries, which have bigger screens, buttons, and batteries, interest in incorporating extra functionality in watches seems to have declined.
Several companies have however attempted to develop a computer contained in a WristWatch (see also wearable computer). As of 2005, the only programmable computer watches to have made it to market are the Seiko Ruputer, the Matsucom onHand, and the Fossil, Inc. WristPDA, although many digital watches come with extremely sophisticated data management software built in.
See also
- List of watch manufacturers
- Wearable computer
- 10:08 - The time to which most watches are set in advertisements
- Wikipedia Commons Watch Images, from category "watches."
External links
- American Watchmakers-Clockmakers Institute
- How does a watch work? FH, Switzerland
- Chronocentric: "The largest independent, non-commercial, consumer-oriented resource on the Internet for owners, collectors and enthusiasts of fine wristwatches."
- Watches
- Mechanical Watch FAQ 1.0 from TimeZone.com
- ThePuristS.com: an independent, non-commercial resource for horological enthusiasts.
- Horological Academy of Independent Creators - Independent Watchmakers