A short history of the wristwatch

The wristwatch was not invented so much as conceded. For most of the four centuries in which people carried mechanical timekeepers, putting one on the wrist was an ornament for women or an eccentricity, and the men who could afford watches kept them in a pocket on a chain. What changed that was not taste but work: artillery, aviation and the need to read the time with both hands full.

The sequence below is dated as tightly as the surviving evidence allows. Where a famous "first" is trade legend rather than record, it is marked as such, because a great deal of watch history began life as an advertisement.

Before the wrist, and the trouble with firsts

Portable timekeeping begins in the early 16th century with the spring-driven clock-watch, worn on a chain round the neck. The Nuremberg locksmith Peter Henlein is traditionally named as its originator, and traditionally is the right word: he was making small spring-driven clocks in the 1510s, but the rest is embroidery.

Watches shrank steadily, and by the 19th century the pocket watch was a mass-produced consumer good. Wrist-worn examples appear throughout, but almost always as bracelets with a small watch set into them, made for women and sold by jewelers. That association became an obstacle: into the 1900s the trade press treated a wrist watch on a man as slightly ridiculous.

Two candidates for "first wristwatch" are worth naming, and neither settles the question. The most cited is a watch Abraham-Louis Breguet made for Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples: an oblong repeating watch on a bracelet, ordered in 1810 and delivered in 1812. Patek Philippe records supplying a wristwatch to Countess Koscowicz of Hungary in 1868 and describes it as the first Swiss wristwatch. Both are real objects with real archive entries, and neither can be shown to be first, because bracelet watches were being made by jewelers whose records are lost.

War puts a watch on a man's wrist

The change came from soldiers. During the colonial campaigns of the 1890s and the Second Boer War of 1899 to 1902, British officers strapped small pocket watches to the wrist in leather cups so they could time an advance without fumbling in a tunic, and retailers sold purpose-made "campaign" and "wristlet" watches for it.

The First World War industrialized the habit. Coordinated artillery barrages needed synchronized timing across scattered positions, and a man in a trench had both hands occupied. Wristwatches were issued, privately bought in enormous numbers, and advertised as service equipment rather than novelty.

The trench watch of 1914 to 1918 is a recognizable type: a small pocket watch movement in a round case with wire lugs soldered on for a leather strap, an enamel dial carrying luminous radium-based numerals, and often a shrapnel guard, a pierced metal cover hinged over the crystal to stop the glass being smashed. Most have snap-backs and no meaningful water resistance.

By the armistice the argument was over. A man wearing a watch on his wrist was a veteran, not a dandy.

What the pocket watch had already solved

Two mechanisms that define modern watches were worked out before anyone needed them on a wrist.

The tourbillon, a rotating carriage carrying the escapement and balance so that vertical positional errors average out, was patented by Abraham-Louis Breguet in 1801, for a watch that sat upright in a waistcoat pocket. On a constantly moving wrist its theoretical benefit is much weaker, which is worth remembering when you see one sold as a precision feature.

Self-winding is older still. Abraham-Louis Perrelet is generally credited with a working automatic pocket watch in the 1770s, driven by a weighted mass responding to the wearer's walking, though the credit is contested: Hubert Sarton of Liège described a rotor-based automatic in 1778. Either way, pocket automatics worked poorly, because a pocket watch does not move enough.

Winding itself, and sealing the case

Harwood, and the crown problem

The English watchmaker John Harwood patented a self-winding wristwatch in 1923. A pivoting weight swung through a limited arc between buffer springs, and the design dispensed with the winding crown: you set the hands by turning the bezel, so there was no crown hole for dust and water. Production followed in the late 1920s, through a company that did not survive the slump of the early 1930s.

Rolex introduced its Perpetual rotor in 1931: a weight free to rotate through a full circle rather than bouncing between stops, which wound more efficiently and became the pattern almost every automatic has followed since. The mechanics are in our guide to automatic versus manual winding.

The Oyster

Water and dust killed more watches than shocks did. Rolex's Oyster case of 1926 combined a screw-down case back, screw-down bezel and a screw-down crown, the last based on a patent by two Swiss watchmakers that the company acquired. The demonstration came in October 1927, when Mercedes Gleitze wore one on a ribbon round her neck for a Channel swim. The detail usually left out is that this was her "vindication swim", made after a successful crossing earlier the same month had been publicly doubted, and that she was pulled from the water before finishing it. The watch came out dry, and Rolex bought the front page of the Daily Mail the following month to say so. Water resistance as a measured property took decades longer to standardize.

Issued equipment: 1939 to 1945

The Second World War made the wristwatch a specification rather than a product. Governments wrote requirements and bought against them.

The German Luftwaffe's Beobachtungsuhr or B-Uhr navigation watches were very large, highly legible center-seconds pieces with hacking movements, made to be strapped over a flight jacket and set to a time signal. The United States bought to written ordnance specifications. Britain issued the W.W.W. requirement, standing for Watch, Wrist, Waterproof, near the end of the war, supplied by twelve manufacturers whose surviving watches collectors call the Dirty Dozen. The lasting effect was cultural: legibility, robustness and a stated performance requirement became things a watch could be sold on.

The tool watch decade

The 1950s took the military logic into civilian catalogs. Each type answered a specific job.

• Dive watches. Rotating timing bezels, high water resistance and strong lume, for a diver tracking bottom time against a gas supply. Blancpain's Fifty Fathoms, the Rolex Submariner and the Zodiac Sea Wolf all date from 1953 or 1954, and arguing about the order is a hobby in itself: even the launch dates are reported inconsistently, the Submariner in particular being dated to 1953 by some sources and to its 1954 Basel presentation by others. Formal criteria arrived much later with ISO 6425, covered in our dive watch guide.
• Pilot's watches. Legibility, a large crown usable with gloves, and often a rotating bezel for elapsed time or a slide rule for flight calculations.
• Anti-magnetic watches. A soft-iron inner case that shunts magnetic flux around the movement, for engineers working near generators and, later, near medical equipment. The IWC Ingenieur, Omega Railmaster and Rolex Milgauss all date from the mid to late 1950s, the last named for the 1,000 gauss it was specified to withstand. See magnetism and watches for what that means now.

December 25, 1969

On Christmas Day 1969, Seiko put the Astron on sale in Tokyo: the first quartz wristwatch offered to the public, made in a small run and priced at a level comparable to a car. Swiss laboratories were not behind on the science, since the Center Electronique Horloger in Neuchâtel had quartz prototypes under observatory test in 1967. What the industry lacked was the will to reorganize around a product that made its accumulated skill irrelevant.

The consequences were quick and brutal. Quartz was more accurate, cheaper at volume and did not need the trade of a watchmaker. Swiss watchmaking employment fell from roughly 90,000 in the early 1970s to close to a third of that by the mid-1980s, and the number of firms fell by a similar order. Whole categories of supplier disappeared. The comparison that caused all this is set out in our quartz versus mechanical guide.

Swatch, consolidation and the mechanical revival

The Swiss response came in two parts. Structurally, the groups ASUAG and SSIH merged in 1983 into the entity renamed the Swatch Group in 1998, under Nicolas Hayek. Commercially, the Swatch arrived in 1983: a sealed plastic quartz watch built from few parts, with the case acting as the movement's base plate, cheap to make and sold as fashion. It restored volume and cash flow.

A counter-movement began almost simultaneously. Blancpain was relaunched in 1983 on the promise that it had never made a quartz watch. The steel luxury sports watches Audemars Piguet and Patek Philippe launched in the 1970s became icons. The Academie Horlogere des Createurs Independants was founded in 1985 to give independent makers a platform. Through the 1990s the mechanical watch was repositioned from obsolete instrument to deliberate luxury, and a collector and auction market grew around it, eventually producing results in the tens of millions of dollars for a few historic pieces. Consolidation continued in parallel: Richemont assembled its watch brands from 1988 onward, and LVMH bought TAG Heuer and Zenith in 1999.

The smartwatch era, and where things stand

The Apple Watch went on sale in 2015, and within a few years analysts estimated that Apple alone was shipping more wrist devices annually than the entire Swiss watch industry. The effect was not the one predicted: cheap quartz and fashion watches took the damage, while mechanical watches, already sold on craft rather than function, were largely unaffected in value terms.

The smartwatch finished a job quartz started. A mechanical watch is now unambiguously a considered object, chosen rather than needed. Swiss export figures have for years shown falling unit volumes alongside rising value, which is the signature of that shift.

Two present-day developments matter. Microbrands, small firms designing watches around bought-in movements and selling directly online, have put competent mechanical watches at prices the traditional distribution model could not reach. And the pre-owned market is now a mainstream channel, with dedicated platforms, group-owned resellers and, since 2022, a certified pre-owned program run by Rolex itself. For most buyers the second-hand market is the market, which is why we treat buying pre-owned as a core skill. Meanwhile the wrist itself is contested again, and our comparison of smartwatches and mechanical watches sets out what each is actually for.

A timeline of the milestones