How Did the Watch Evolve in History?

The seasons, the sun and the moon were mans' earliest measure of time and knowing these changes were obviously so important they may have meant surviving or not surviving.

Sundials and water clocks were the first clocks or ways of measuring time that early man used. Sundials needed the sun and could not always be used in all weather conditions. Sundials might show what time of day it was but the water clock which was basically a vessel holding water and allowing it to drip into another vessel could show how much time had passed in a particular period whether it was day or night, cloudy or sunny.

The hourglass is still used today in forms such as the egg timer. It was limited in use but could measure a period of time with great accuracy. In ancient Greece people would carry these around and use them a bit like we use clocks today.

The word "clock" comes from an early word which meant "bell" and as a bell was struck every hour in some villages then we understand how people got to be comfortable with this public use of time measurement and came to rely on it.

In early mediaeval times a mechanical clock was invented and one of the most famous of these is the clock made in France for King Charles V. Made by Henry de Wyck in 1364 it still was functioning until 1850.

Peter Henlein came up with the idea of a coiled spring being used to measure time around about 1500 in Germany. So the pocket watch was invented crude as it was.

Hundreds of years passed before the Swiss improved the mechanism so that time could be measured accurately and massed produced as what we can today call a watch.

Watches were thought of as pieces of jewellery rather than functional necessary items and so they became fancy and colourful.