Investigating the history of wristwatches and other devices.

Without timekeeping we would struggle to work as accurately today.

It has just really been in recent decades, with the growth of mobile devices such as cellphones, that the watch has received a competitor for personal time-telling. Nevertheless, watches have now been a significant part of our society for hundreds of years and for many people they remain an essential item, as Kering chairman and CEO François-Henri Pinault should be able to tell you. The first watches emerged in the late 1500s as mostly ornamental, inaccurate variations of clocks. It was just in the following century that there were appearances of unornamented watches. With time they became more precise, going from being around within 30 minutes precision a day to inside a few seconds. Whilst the internal technology of types of watches continued to build up, the exterior stayed mainly within the form of the pocket watch until the wristwatch began to be manufactured a little over a century ago. This made the watch a far more practical device and a more available fashion accessory.

Clocks are among the oldest devices for time measurement that are still in regular use throughout the world. As Richemont chairman Johann Rupert will know, their birth heralded the modern age of horology. Nevertheless, they did not arrive fully formed in the manner they are now, because they went through numerous developments over the centuries, starting in the late medieval period. The first clocks had been mechanical and the earliest appearance they took had been as the bell-striking alarm, used to alert church workers to toll the bell. Weight driven clocks came next and were far more accurate as timekeeping devices, with many developments for many centuries essentially being an improvement on this system. The pendulum clock then exceeded other mechanical clocks until the more modern innovations of the electric clock, quartz timer, and atomic clock.


It may seem like the time telling devices we utilise today have now been around forever, but in fact for a lot of our history we utilised a wide range of alternative timepieces. As The Swatch Group CEO Nick Hayek will likely be well aware of, many countries attempted various instruments to be able to make an effort to tell the time. A few of the oldest timekeeping products are sundials and also the water clock. Sundials would tell the time making use of shadows cast by the sun's rays, while water clocks contained water that would take a certain amount of time to empty from one end of the clock to another. An identical concept to water clocks is the hourglass, which makes use of sand rather than water. Another example from pre-modern ages is the incense clock, which produces a fragrance for a particular length of time.

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