The History of Time has been provided to iW Magazine by Keith Flamer. Images provided by Antiquorium.
Time has been told many ways: by sun, moon, stars, planets, temperature, stones, shadows, and of course, by mechanical instruments. This wasn't always the case. In the beginning, early cavemen had little reason to care about time, beyond night and day. Eventually, mankind learned that the shadow of a rock or a tree could be used to judge how the day was progressing.
From that moment on, we have always found a reason or excuse to time our lives—whether the reason is agricultural, religious, educational, practical, etc. The way we measure time is as old and complex as history itself. It is a revolution that never ends. The centuries-long infatuation with timekeeping is a great legacy from ambitious astronomers in ancient times.
Astronomers from great civilizations in the Middle East and North Africa invented rudimentary timekeeping instruments as early as 4000 B.C. to augment their sophisticated calendars and to organize their flourishing societies, agricultural needs and formal religious activities, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency within the U.S. Commerce Department's Technology Administration.
Unlike calendars, the first devices for measuring time intervals of less than a day took the form of elemental clocks (non-mechanical)—sundials, sand hourglasses, water clocks, candle clocks, oil lamp clocks—from which modern watches are distant descendants.
The advanced civilizations of the Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans launched the quest for precise time measurement, but they could hardly imagine a day centuries later when anyone could strap a timepiece around their wrist that could time split seconds accurately. Trillions of inexact minutes would pass before these primitive timekeeping methods ticked into the accurate mechanical and electronic age.
Sundials or “Sun Clocks”
While the exact origin of timekeeping is speculative, the desire for it is well documented. In 4000 B.C., the learned men of Babylon divided day and night into twelve equal parts, giving us the familiar 24-hour day. The Babylonian culture's infatuation with all things “60,” begat 60-minute hours and 60-second minutes, albeit much later when technology permitted such fine divisions.
After the Sumerians and Babylonians, the Egyptians were next to formally divide their day into parts. Inspired by their sun god Ra, Egyptian wise men introduced architectural marvels called obelisks (slender, four-sided stone structures tapering skyward toward pyramidal tops) as early as 3500 B.C. Moving shadows cast a “sundial” effect around the obelisks, enabling people to divide the day into morning and afternoon—or solar time. The obelisk sundial revealed the longest and shortest days of the year when the shadow was longest or shortest at noon.
Egyptians later added markers around the obelisks' base to calibrate the time more precisely. This invention is likely the origin of today's dial designs and the clockwise rotation of watches and clocks. Obelisks, from the Greek word obeliskos meaning “needle” can still be found worldwide (Cleopatra's Needle on London's River Thames, Saint Peter's Square in Rome, and The Washington Monument on the Washington, D.C., mall included).
Based on obelisks, Egyptians developed another shadow clock in 1500 B.C. which possibly became the first portable timepiece. According to NIST, this device divided a sunlit day into ten parts, plus two more twilight hours in the morning and evening. Generations of other sundial designs descended from the Egyptian originals. Today, sundials are nostalgic items.
Water Clocks
Sundials were innovative for their time, but how were these civilizations to measure time at night or on overcast days?
Water clocks were among the earliest instruments that didn't rely on celestial clues. Sometimes called “discharge clocks,” they were used when it wasn't possible to observe the sun or stars. Water clocks were cylindrical stone containers with a hollow interior, like a bowl or a vase, which allowed water to drip at a nearly constant rate from a small hole on the bottom. One of the oldest was found in the tomb of Egyptian Pharaoh Amenhotep I, buried around 1504 B.C.
Later named clepsydras by the Greeks around 325 B.C., other water clocks were designed to slowly fill with water at a constant rate, indicated by measuring cup-like interior markings that indicated the passing of hours as the water level reached them. The Chinese, Greeks and Romans continually improved these clocks by regulating pressure for a better rate of water flow and by creating fancier displays of time passage.
Despite their relative lack of accuracy and the subsequent development of mechanical clocks, these rudimentary clocks lasted until as late as 1800 A.D. in some cultures.
Astrolabes
The astrolabe was an ancient astronomical navigational tool used by classical astronomers and astrologers to measure the altitude and direction of celestial bodies over the horizon, calculate the seasons, the movements of the zodiac and to foretell eclipses. This highly complex instrument indicates the position of the sun, the moon and the stars in the sky at any given hour as seen from Earth. It also indicates sunrise and sunset, dawn and dusk, moon phases, moonrise and moonset, eclipses of sun and moon, the month and the day of the week. It also determined the local time, longitude, surveying and triangulation.
Most historians credit the invention of the astrolabe to the Greek astronomer Hipparchus in the second century B.C. and Hypatia of Alexandria, an Egyptian astronomer/astrologer and mathemetician. It would be the chief navagational instrument until the invention of the sextant in the eighteenth century. Astrologers of the Islamic world and European nations also used astrolabes to construct horoscopes.
These instruments would prove useful for centuries and it would eventually fascinate the likes of Leonardo da Vinci and Geoffrey Chaucer. In 1291, Prince Asulid of Yemen made a worthy astrolabe. The first known European metal astrolabe would be developed later in the fifteenth century by Abraham Zacuto in Lisbon. Metal astrolabes improved on the accuracy of their wooden precursors and eventually detected time at night. As technology and other timekeeping instruments developed, astrolabes evolved into novelty items, including the very complex and recently made Astrolabium wristwatch from Ulysse Nardin.
Calibrated Candle Clocks
Calibrated candles were thin wax columns with evenly spaced, numbered markings that, when burned, indicated the passage of periods of time. At the time, they provided an effective way to tell time indoors, at night, or on cloudy days. According to Anthony J. Turner's 1984 book The Time Museum, Volume 1, Time Measuring Instruments, a candle clock could be easily transformed into a timer by sticking a heavy nail into the candle at the mark indicating the desired interval. When the wax surrounding the nail melts, the nail clatters onto a plate below.
The exact origin of candle clocks is murky, but one of the earliest references to them appeared in a Chinese poem by You Jiangu A.D. 520. Similar measuring candles were also used in Japan until the early tenth century A.D.
The most commonly mentioned candle clock is attributed to King Alfred the Great of England (c. 878 A.D.), whose device consisted of six candles, each divided into twelve sections. Each candle burned away completely in four hours, making each marking twenty minutes. The candles were placed for protection inside cases made of a wooden frame with transparent horn panels in the sides.
Similar methods of measuring time were used in medieval churches, first by counting the number of candles of a specific size burnt, and later by use of a graduated candle. Religion would carry the timekeeping torch in subsequent centuries, as technological advancement virtually ceased during the Middle Ages (500 to 1500).
Mechanical Time
Mechanical time indicators made their debut in houses of worship, traced back to seventh-century monasteries, and later in churches. Literature and Scriptures from the Middle Ages refer to the word “orologio,” which possibly referred to mechanical clocks.
Popes were the mainsprings of timekeeping instrument accuracy. Around 604, Pope Sabinian ordered “canonical hours” where devotions, such as the Eucharist, were read at specific times of the day. Monasteries were ordered to follow this new edict. Going forward monks developed an interest in more reliable forms of timekeeping like tower clocks. At the dawn of the eleventh century Gerbert d'Aurillac, a scholarly monk who eventually became Pope Silvester II, is credited by some with inventing the pendulum clock concept and introducing Arabic numerals to the western world.
Clocks
The first true mechanical clocks were installed in church towers for public use and were built in the 12th century in Italy and England, according to Zurich-based Beyer Clock and Watch Museum, which holds more than 500 chronological instruments dating back to 1400 BC. Among the first was the St. Eustorgio church bell tower in Milan, Italy. Germany and France soon followed with Gothic styled clock towers.
Religious ceremonies aside, clock towers (often with four-sided dials for easy visibility) almost exclusively the central focal point of small towns and villages, serving as a universal time gauge for townspeople before they had the opportunity or means to own clocks and watches.
Most of these massive wood-and-iron tower clocks were created by blacksmiths and featured a weight-driven turret mechanism that marked the hours with loud bells, and/or musical melodies to highlight important moments in communities.
These tower clock mechanisms were regulated by a verge-and-foliot escapement (circa 1275), variations of which ruled for more than 300 years despite one basic problem—the period of oscillation of the escapement depended heavily on the driving force and friction of the drive, which was difficult to regulate. The earliest known mechanical clock mechanism, the verge is also known as the crown-wheel-and-verge escapement. It pre-dates the pendulum and was originally controlled by a foliot, a horizontal bar with a weight at each end.
In the Far East, mechanized astronomical/astrological clockmaking developed from 200 to 1300 A.D. One of the most famously elaborate was Su Sung's 30-foot clock tower mechanism from 1088 A.D. that used a water-driven escapement and a bronze armillary sphere for observations, an automatically rotating celestial globe and five front panels with doors that allowed viewing of mannequins that rang bells, gongs and held tablets indicating the hour of the day. But the uncontrollable rate of water flow for such a clock was inaccurate, despite its impressive aesthetics.
Around 1450, domestic clocks (miniature versions of public tower clocks) were introduced in northern Italy and southern Germany. Like church tower clocks, they were created by blacksmiths.
Portable Watches
Around 1524, Germany's Peter Henlein, a locksmith, invented the world's first watch when he placed a timepiece movement inside an iron casing. This portable timepiece featured Roman and Arabic numerals, and 12 small Braille-like knobs that allowed for reading the time at night.
However, they only had an hour hand, as a minute hand would have been useless considering the inaccuracy of the watch mechanism (accurate to within thirty minutes per day).
Called “Nürnberg Eggs” because of their unique elliptical shape, they were primarily hand-held or worn as a pendant (“neck watch”) on the breast of a shirt or jacket—the precursor to pocket watches (or pocket clocks as they were sometimes called). Nürnberg Eggs were soon imitated throughout Europe in other metals such as brass and steel. Eventually, miniaturization of these spring-based designs allowed for accurate portable timepieces which worked well even at sea.
Even da Vinci tried his hand at designing clocks (see Would-Be Watchmakers, accompanying this story). He understood the challenges in keeping a clock wound. In timekeeping, Da Vinci is most credited with inventing the fusee and chain to compensate for maximum and minimum power during clock winding. However, da Vinci, plagued by more ideas than he could handle, never constructed his design.
Despite growing popularity of this craft, the official watchmaking and clockmaking trade didn't flourish until much later. References to clockmaking first appeared in historical records in 1583, according to the Beyer Museum.
Renaissance Table Clocks reached their zenith in southern Germany. Due to the region's prosperity, clockmakers began working with high quality materials such as gold, silver, tortoise shell, etc.. This trend spread as accuracy and elaborate aesthetics took center stage. Asia, especially China, surely had an influence on this trend.
“After the Renaissance, with the invention of the mainspring, the different parts of Europe, especially Germany, Poland, France and England were so technologically-advanced,” says Osvaldo Patrizzi, chairman of Antiquorum. “They produced fantastic watches and clocks.”
These ornately-designed clocks and watches spread throughout Europe, but in one prominent Swiss canton, opulence would eventually smash into a brick wall that nearly decapitated a promising craft.
In 1541, John Calvin (a.k.a. Jean Chauvin) resettled back to Geneva and transformed the city into a new capital of the Reformation movement. As this news spread throughout Europe, Protestants from France, Italy and Flanders fled to Geneva. However, Calvin had imposed many strict laws banning theater, dancing, and other forms of art and entertainment. This included a ban on wearing elaborate clothing and jewelry.
It was initially a doomsday scenario for Geneva's many jewelers, but a loophole in Calvin's laws gave them a unique opportunity. Calvin considered watches items of practical use, therefore their manufacture was allowed under the stricter Geneva.
Geneva's stifled jewelers and goldsmiths then collaborated with refugee watchmakers who recently fled there to make watches with jewels, enamels, and engravings. This collaboration spawned the beginning of Geneva's—and Switzerland's—luxury watch, clock and enamel painting industries.
In 1601, Geneva watchmakers organized to regulate their profession by forming the Watchmakers Guild of Geneva with 500 members. Subsequently, many master watchmakers resettled into outer areas such as Neuchatel, Bern, Basel and the Jura Mountain region of Switzerland, all of which are renowned for watchmaking today.
Watchmaking flourished due to this abundance of skilled labor. It also inspired an unprecedented period of curiosity in watchmaking, especially with regard to accuracy. Watchmakers, scientists, philosophers, astronomers and others rushed into this burgeoning field.
Pendulum Power
At age 19, Galileo Galilei, an Italian physicist, astronomer and philosopher (considered the “father of science”) noted that a pendulum's swing always take the same amount of time, independently of the amplitude. Legend says Galileo came to this conclusion by watching the swings of a bronze chandelier in the cathedral of Pisa, using his pulse to time it. While Galileo believed this equality of period to be exact, it is only an approximation appropriate to small amplitudes. However, it is good enough to regulate a clock, as Galileo recognized.
Galileo's research served as a roadmap for future scientists. His isochronism discovery eventually led him to design a pendulum clock with special “duplex” escapement, and enhance the verge escapement for mechanical watches. However, Galileo's clock design was never constructed. This inspired a Dutch scientist named Christiaan Huygens, who further discovered, in reality, that oscillation duration slightly increased in cases of great amplitudes.
In 1612, after determining the orbital patterns of Jupiter's satellites, Galileo proposed that these satellite positions as a universal clock, which could possibly determine longitude. He worked on this problem for the rest of his life with little success. For sea navigation, where telescopic observations were more difficult, the longitude problem eventually required development of a practical portable chronometer, like that of John Harrison.
What Pope Sabinian and Galileo started in pendulums, others raced to perfect. Pendulums became a feature of regular and accurate timekeeping as scientists struggled to find a flawless pendulum mechanism. Huygens was among the first to practically use pendulums to regulate clock movements and keep more accurate time. He also determined the true relationship between the length of a pendulum and the time taken by its swing.
In 1675, Huygens bridged the old world and new world with his invention of the balance spring or “hairspring” on mechanical watches, making them accurate to within five minutes per day—a quantum leap for a growing watchmaking trade. Huygens is widely credited as the inventor, but not without dispute. Some claim the hairspring was invented by Robert Hooke in 1664 or Thomas Tompion in 1675. Royal Society notes discovered in a cupboard in February 2006, gave even more credence to Hooke's claim on the invention. Regardless, this invention made great strides in terms of accuracy and gave the minute hand more significance on a dial.
“In the middle of the 17th century, with the invention of the pendulum for the clock, it established the first regulator and the first clocks accurate to within one or two seconds per day,” says Patrizzi. “So still, the time difference for a clock made between 1680 and 1700, would only be off by about one minute per week, after three or four hundred years [have elapsed]. It was a fantastic revolution.”
Still, Switzerland did not achieve its status as watchmaking central until the Industrial Revolution of the middle of 19th century, thanks to a handful of master watchmakers whose inventions changed the landscaping of timekeeping forever.
Other escapements followed: the horizontal cylinder escapement (George Graham, 1700); the “dead-beat” escapement (Graham, 1715); the English-lever escapement (Thomas Mudge, 1759); and the grasshopper escapement, developed by Englishman John Harrison.
Longitude
Harrison, a trained carpenter and self-taught clockmaker, built his first “longcase” clock (or “grandfather clock”) in 1713 at age twenty. Naturally, the mechanism was made entirely of wood. Harrison's desire to improve the performance of pendulum clocks led to his invention of the gridiron pendulum, a system of alternating brass and iron rods which compensate for different expansions and contractions which ultimately cancel each other out. Harrison's grasshopper escapement was a control device for the step-by-step release of a clock's driving power. This method was nearly frictionless and required no oiling.
Harrison's greatest challenge and success was inventing the marine chronometer (circa 1761), the first timepiece to successfully navigate longitude at sea. The invention was inspired by the Longitude Prize, a British government competition with a large monetary reward to the creator of the first timepiece to accurately determine longitude.
Before chronometers, many sailors perished at sea when their ships ran aground or they found themselves in the wrong spot at the wrong time. Astronomers' solution relied on using the stars for longitude, while watchmakers and clockmakers raced to solve the problem with timing. Harrison had competitors who tried to stop him, but after many years and four different chronometers, he succeeded in spite of the heavy competition. And sailors worldwide breathed a sigh of relief.
England, driven to bolster its mastery high seas, invested great government capital in encouraging the construction of marine chronometers, for trade and national security reasons. It subsequently became a leading clockmaking nation. George Graham, England's most credible horologist, was essential to England's emergence in clockmaking. But Harrison's marine chronometer once again placed high priority on portability.
The earliest need for portability in timekeeping 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 the midday (high noon) time of the local longitude to that of a European meridian (Paris or Greenwich)—a time kept on a shipboard clock. However, the process was notoriously unreliable until the introduction of Harrison's chronometer. For that reason, most maps from the 15th century through the 19th century 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-clocks” 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 France
Meanwhile in France, two other geniuses were advancing watch technology—Abraham-Louis Perrelet and his prized watchmaking student Abraham-Louis Breguet. Around 1770 in LeLocle, Switzerland, Perrelet revolutionized the winding technique when he invented the “perpetual” or automatic watch with a self-winding movement.
This fundamentally changed watchmaking, a craft that was exploding with creativity at the time. Prior to this, watch owners were forced to wind their timepieces manually with a key. With this ingenious mechanism, Perrelet made it possible to harness the energy generated by simple body movements and use it to wind the mainspring.
Breguet would later improve this feature and create an extraordinary legacy for himself as well. In 1783, Breguet invented the gong spring or chiming mechanism for minute-repeaters, making them smaller. In 1790 he invents the parachute anti-lock device to protect the balance wheel.
In 1783, Abraham-Louis Breguet invents the gong spring for repeaters, which helped make repeaters much smaller. Before the discovery of electricity, repeater watches allowed time to be determined at night via an audible chime which sounded the hours and/or minutes—like a church clock tower bell. Repeater watches would eventually become pricey nostalgia for watch collectors, who would covet complications of time gone by.
In 1795, he introduced the tourbillon, a device which compensates for positional errors in the escapement caused by gravity. It remains one of the most difficult mechanisms to manufacture today. Also in 1795, Breguet invented the overcoil balance spring, which greatly improved accuracy and is still used in high quality mechanical watches. Many current watch companies owe a debt of gratitude to Breguet who was the first watchmaker devoted to marketing.
Equally influential, Breguet's brand was the first watch company devoted to marketing, now a watch industry staple. Breguet was a marketing company as much as it was a man and watchmaker.
Pocket Watches (1800-1920)
Wristwatches didn't begin to fascinate the general population until the dawn of the 20th century. Before new technology allowed for further miniaturization, most watches between 1800 and 1920 were pocket watches that were carried in a pocket or attached to a chain. These watches had an easy-to-open dial covers.
British Puritans, including poet John Milton, were among the first to place watches in pockets. Like many Calvinist Reformists, Puritans didn't believe in ostentatious display of gold or silver, so they placed timepieces discreetly in their pockets and called them pocket watches.
From the fifteenth century to the eighteenth century, clocks and watches were exclusively the property of royalty, church pastors and the privileged. But portability opened watches up for the citizenry, even though watches were still relatively expensive.
In the 1800s, complicated watch production soared with inventions like
the perpetual calendar, chronographs (Rieussec, 1821) and the fly-back hand which was capable of recording accurate finishing times for multiple racers simultaneously.
Wristwatch Fashions
There has always been some dispute over who wore the first true wristwatch. What's never disputed is that she was surely a noblewoman. The first documented evidence states England's Queen Elizabeth I wore the first bracelet watch on her wrist, as per notations from an official Papal visit to Britain in 1580 (yet another Pope fascinated with timekeeping). Other women who coveted these bracelet watches were the Queen of Naples in 1810 who wore a Breguet and Countess Kocewicz, a Polish noblewoman who specifically requested a Patek Philippe.
This “feminine fad” eventually trickled to non-royal, affluent women in the mid-to-late 1800s. It featured ornate styles with ribbon-like straps. Wristwatches were a woman's accessory. Most men still preferred pocketwatches until unfortunate events forever changed how watches would be worn.
True, women made wristwatches fashionable, but men thrust wristwatches into the mainstream. There are records of wristwatches (including those from Patek Philippe and Breguet) dating back as far as 1885.
War & Timepiece
Aviators and soldiers were among the first men to wear wristwatches. In 1904, Cartier supplied Brazilian socialite and aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont with his special request, a hands-free, leather-band wristwatch while flying his aircraft—primarily dirigible balloons
and airplanes, which some still claim he pioneered.
Regardless, Santos-Dumont was the first person to demonstrate that routine, controlled flight was possible. His wristwatch was as critical as any instrument in his makeshift cockpit. Soon afterward, Louis Cartier, a friend of Santos-Dumont, was able to sell these fashionable wristwatches to other men. Pilots were on board with this new wristwatch trend. Masculine firms began to manufacture “pilot watches.”
The trend has since spread to other parts of the world, wherever accurate and convenient time references are required.
During the Great War (World War I), 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 pocketwatch. Early in the war, officer casualty rates were high, but working-class replacements couldn't afford watches, so the Army supplied wristwatches to them. Artillery and infantry officers were required to sychronize their wristwatches to conduct attacks at precise times 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 wrists– a direct result of World War I.
Practical Watches
By the 1920s, consumers accepted wristwatches as practical. Pocketwatch sales declined dramatically. With the exploits of aviators such as Charles Lindbergh, pilot watches gained favor, especially for men. To the contrary, the 1930s introduced vibrant Art Deco themes, a vibrant style of pastels and colored stones that poured fashion back into watches after the basic black-and-white timepieces of the 1920s. Cartier fully embraced this period while other companies experimented with curved cases and movements (ww and Movado's PolyPlan were prime examples).
Miniaturization continued in 1929 as Jaeger-LeCoultre introduced the world's tiniest watch movement. This caliber 101 measured 14mm x 4.8mm x 3.4mm and weighs 1 gram–and it is still used by the firm.
Fork in the Road
Electric clocks use electric current as a power source instead of a weight or spring. In essence, the electric clock is an electric motor synchronized with an alternating current power line (60 hertz in the United States). The accuracy of these watches depends entirely upon the AC frequency.
Tuning fork watches (introduced by Bulova in 1960) used a 360 hertz tuning fork to drive a mechanical watch. Since the fork is used in place of a typical balance wheel, these watches had a natural hum instead of ticking. The inventor, Max Hetzel, was born in Basel, Switzerland, and joined the Bulova Watch Company of Bienne, Switzerland, in 1948. Hetzel was the first to use an electronic device, a transistor, in a wristwatch. Thus, he developed the first watch that could be qualified as electronic.
However, fork movements are actually more “electrical,” like an old electrical wall clock, then electronic. The sweep seconds hand moves fluidly like that in an old electrical wall clock. Such watches were also sold by Swiss watch companies under license of Bulova.
Tuning fork movements are electromechanical. The task of converting electronically pulsed fork vibration into rotary movement is done via two tiny jeweled fingers that are connected to one of the the tuning fork's tines. As the fork vibrates, the jeweled fingers precisely ratchet a tiny index wheel. This index wheel has over 300 barely visible teeth and spins more than 38 million times per year. The tiny electric coils that drive the tuning fork have 8,000 turns of insulated copper wire with a diameter of 0.015 mm and a length of 90 meters. This amazing feat of engineering was prototyped in the 1950s.
Swiss watch quality was high, but new technology such as the Hamilton Electric Watch, introduced in 1957, and the Bulova Accutron tuning fork watch, introduced on October 25, 1960, foreshadowed a technology showdown on the horizon.
The Quartz Revolution
The components for the quartz watch emerged from independent streams of invention that stretched over nearly a century. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries scientists identified new materials like liquid crystals and discovered unknown properties such as piezoelectricity. During the Cold war, researchers in defense and aerospace technologies laid the basis for miniaturizing electronic circuitry. In the 1960s, enterprising manufacturers applied the new research to the first electronic consumer products–televisions, calculators, hearing aids, and watches.
The quartz watch race mirrored the space race from the 1950s through
the 1960s. Prior to John F. Kennedy's bold promise to put “man on the moon,” Seiko and the Swiss vowed to put battery-powered watches on people's wrists with unprecedented, long-term accuracy.
Seiko launched a top-secret program in 1959 in search of the world's most accurate wristwatch. By the 1964 Summer Olympics, the innovative Japanese juggernaut was getting closer. Seiko developed a seven-pound quartz sports timing clock for those games. Years later, Seiko miniaturized the technology and introduced the first quartz wall clock.
Simultaneously, a Swiss research group, Centre Electronique Horloger (CEH) in Neuchatel, worked in secrecy to develop a battery-powered watch, defying centuries of Swiss watchmaking tradition. Some of these researchers hailed from Swiss university programs in physics or electrical engineering. Others were seasoned scientific investigators, most with Swiss educations and work experience in cutting-edge American laboratories.
Under intense pressure to succeed, CEH's first prototypes rated a new precision record for timing accuracy, off only a few tenths of a second per day.
In 1967, CEH produced the first prototype quartz wristwatch, a 13-jewel, 8-khz quartz module called “Beta 21.” The following year, an industrial consortium of Swiss watch manufacturers was created to mass produce the Beta 21 under their branded names, including Rolex and Omega.
However, in a spectacular case of cold feet, the Swiss suddenly abandoned the plan, concluding that quartz technology wasn't practical for watches after all. This decision would cost the Swiss watchmaking industry dearly.
Quartz technology features a specially-designed battery that activates a quartz crystal inside the movement which vibrates 33,000 times per second. Quartz crystal works better because there are no gears or escapements to disturb their regular frequency. Quartz timepieces still rely on a mechanical vibration but the frequency depends on the crystal's size, shape and temperature.
This new technology completely eliminated winding and improved accuracy to within a staggering one minute per year. Meanwhile traditional mechanical timepieces were accurate to within an hour per year at the time.
On Christmas Day 1969, five months after Neil Armstrong hopped across the Moon's landscape, Seiko shocked the world with the space-age-sounding Quartz Astron 35SQ—an 18-karat-gold quartz watch, whose $1,200 price tag matched that of a Toyota Corolla. The Quartz Astron was accurate to plus or minutes three seconds per month.
A new digital age was breaking through the surface. Cheaper electronics permitted the popularization of the digital watch (an electronic watch with a numerical rather than analog display). The first digital watch, a Pulsar prototype in 1970, was developed jointly by Hamilton Watch Company and Electro-Data. These watches featuring the iconic red light-emitting diode (LED) hit the market in 1972. It would be a short-lived sensation.
Most watches with LED displays required pressing a button to display the time for a few seconds. However, these LEDs drained so much battery power from the watches that they could not operate continuously.
Watches with LED displays were popular for the next few years, but soon they were superseded by liquid crystal displays (LCDs), which used less battery power.
By the mid 1970s, a recession and inexpensive, Asian-made quartz watches mired traditional Swiss watchmaking in a crisis. Quality Swiss companies went bankrupt while others struggled to stay relevant. Switzerland, which launched its watchmaking industry on a Geneva fluke, was threatened by what many considered a fad. It was not. One of Switzerland's greatest resources and exports was in the midst of a major crisis.
In 1979, another Swiss research team convened. This time, the researchers embraced technology– and the future. Switzerland would give quartz watches a try. The goal: produce an affordable, water-resistant, shock-resistant, quartz analog plastic watch at a low production cost. In 1981, Swiss firm SMH announced mission accomplished.
Originally named S-Watch, Swatch launched twelve models in Switzerland, Germany and Great Britain on March 1, 1983. Swatch sparked a phenomenon and later inspired a new category—fashion watches. It has since sold hundreds of millions of watches. Swatch is still credited with helping revive a Swiss watch industry on the brink of collapse.
Today, most watches are quartz and they remain the most affordable and accurate watches on the market. Japan has long paved the way for the future with many quartz brands, and now with Seiko Kinetic and Citizen Eco-Drive, quartz watches that never need batteries. Even the cellular phone, which typically displays the time onscreen, is often relied on as a type of modern-day pocket watch.
A typical quartz wristwatch will gain or lose less than a half second per day at body temperature. If a quartz wristwatch is “rated” by measuring it against an atomic clock's time broadcast, and worn on one's body to keep its temperature constant, the corrected time can easily be as accurate as two seconds per month, more than good enough to perform celestial navigation. The accuracy of quartz watches and clocks are only surpassed by atomic clocks.
The Atomic Age
The development of radar and high frequency radio communications in the 1930s and 1940s spun off electromagnetic waves (or microwaves) capable of working with atoms needed to develop an atomic clock. The first attempts focused on microwave resonances in the ammonia molecule. Based on this theory, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) built the first atomic clock in 1949. While its performance was better than traditional clocks and watches, the difference was negligible.
Soon, NIST used more promising cesium atomic beams to replace ammonia molecules with better results. By 1960, cesium standards were refined enough to enter the official timekeeping system of NIST. In 1967, the cesium atom's frequency was formally recognized as the new international unit of time. One second was defined as 9,192,631,770 oscillations of the cesium atom's resonant frequency, which replaced the old second which was defined in terms of the Earth's motions.
As of 2002, NIST's primary cesium standard was capable of keeping time to about 30 billionths of a second per year—a feat that would make da Vinci and Huygens blush. That's accuracy to within one second in many thousands or even millions of years. The actual clock, called “NIST-F1,” is the eighth installment in the NIST series of cesium clocks.
NIST, the United States Naval Observatory, France, Germany and other world laboratories are working on the next generation of time standards. According to NIST, transportation, communications, financial transactions, manufacturing and electric power have become increasingly dependent on accurate clocks. Atomic clocks remain the most accurate timekeeping instruments the world has seen. And now people can access this accuracy to some degree with “atomic” radio-controlled timekeepers.
Looking ahead
We've examined the past, but what does the future hold? For the curious, there is a unique clock on the horizon, but like a rainbow, we won't ever touch it in our lifetime.
How would you like to own a timepiece that posts a year between ticks and tocks? Or a clock whose cuckoo emerges once a millennium? The Long Now Foundation's 10,000 Year Clock (or Clock of the Long Now) does just that. Unfortunately, the only people who will have a chance to witness the cuckoo emerge are a few fortunate souls who were just born or who have yet to be born, perhaps our great grandchildren.
Developed by Danny Hillis, the 10,000 Year Clock ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every one hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium for the next 10,000 years. It's also called “the world's slowest computer.” This prototype is exhibited at the Science Museum in London in the Making Modern World Exhibit.
The Final Frontier?
Timekeeping has fascinated hypercurious astronomers, mathematicians, astrologers, scientists, philosophers, theorists, physicists, Popes and priests, blacksmiths, jewelers, royalty, and even astronauts. Our watch dials even rotate in an orbital fashion around the dial via the hands. Space isn't merely the final frontier. In timekeeping, it was the first frontier as well.
On this quest to tame time, timekeepers naturally have looked into the future. Ironically, following the space age, scientists and researchers are now looking in the rear view mirror for inspiration by analyzing the past. Like the Hubble telescope we look back and realize how we got to where we are.
NASA isn't the only brand looking to the past for inspiration. The stars were always critical to understanding time, and they still are. Patek Philippe's “Star Caliber 2000” and Ulysse Nardin's “Trilogy of Time” perfectly illustrate the long and complicated chronology of time and the stars that guided us.
Ulysses Nardin and Patek Philippe reach back to pay homage to those rudimentary methods of several millenniums ago. They have constructed limited edition tools for telling time of which the geniuses of yesterday only dreamt.
Released in 2003, Patek Philippe's Star Caliber 2000 combined the simpler past with the advanced technology of the present, all encased in pocketwatches designed for the future. Star Caliber is a double-sided minute repeater-perpetual calendar pocketwatch with a frontal display and a back-side celestial display.
The front dial is dedicated to time measurement and the sun, our daily star. It indicates solar time; day; date; leap years; sunrise and sunset times; seasons; running equation of time; 24-hour day and night indicators; and a 30-hour power reserve for the movement and the genuine Westminster chime.
Ulysse Nardin's Trilogy of Time includes the Astrolabium Galileo Galilei, Planetarium Copernicus & Tellerium Johannes Kepler. The Astrolabium was conceived by chance when Rolf Schnyder, Ulysse Nardin owner, inquired about a wall clock in a reception area that resembled the historic tower clocks in many of Europe's squares and piazzas. It was created by Dr. Ludwig Oeschlin, now the brand's chief horologist.
The Astrolabium measures lunar and solar eclipses, sunrise and sunset, dawn and dusk, moonphases, moonrise, month and day of the week. The Copernicus watch showcases a heliocentric universe with a central sun while reading the astronomical positions of the planets in relation to the sun and the earth, as the moon rotates around the earth. This perpetual calendar also indicates the months and the signs of the zodiac, as they complete one turn in 365.24 days at the exterior.
The Tellerium rotates the earth in its true geographical shape as seen from above the North Pole. Meanwhile a flexible spring bends from the Tropic of Cancer to the Tropic of Capricorn to reveal the part of the earth lit by the sun and to indicate the time and place of sunrise and sunset, as the moon rotates around the Earth.
Patek Philippe's and Ulysse Nardin's timepieces –among a few other complex timepieces– represent the entire chronology of timekeeping—technologically, practically and ambitiously.
And so, timekeeping has come full orbit.
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