The story of pocket watches is fascinating and takes us on tour of history. It can also give some insight into the way human beings have always done things!
In a sense, the story goes back into early history. There is some (fragmentary and not universally accepted) evidence that the ancient peoples of Greece and Rome may have had some forms of hand-held time keeping and navigation devices.
It is certainly clear that by mediaeval times that pocket sundials were well known and examples can be seen in museums.
Of course one of the problems with the sundial as a way of telling the time is that it does rather depend upon the sun – something that’s not always readily available in northern Europe!
So people began to experiment with clocks. The early clocks were massive devices made of wood and iron and typically found in church towers. Yet it didn’t take too long for the clever entrepreneurs and inventers of the period to think about miniaturization. The slogan “make it small and cute” is not a modern invention!
Although the actual date of the earliest is furiously debated, it is clear that by the 16th century there were things that were recognizable as pocket watches that would fit into a largish pocket or bag.
Early Pocket Watches
The very earliest pocket watches were devices that must have appeared almost magical to people at the time. Certainly they were reserved for the very richest and most powerful people in society. Frequently cased in precious metals and/or jewels, these were as much status symbols as timekeeping devices.
In fact, the early watches only had an hour hand and were far from accurate. They can’t have been a lot of help in diary management!
Yet even at this period, people discovered a problem. Once you have your own watch (or clock) then if you wake up in the middle of the night and ask your partner what the time is, you no longer have to anticipate the answer “no idea – we’re miles away from the nearest church”.
Why is this a problem? Well in the days before electricity and modern building materials, houses were firetraps by modern standards – and the people of the time knew this very well. The last thing they wanted to do was to be fumbling around in the dark trying to light candles so they could tell the time on their new-tech pocket watch. We’ll come back to this one later……….
Types Of Pocket Watch
Pocket watches are generally described by a) their escapement type and b) their other features. So a watch may be known as “A verge fusee quarter repeater”. The ‘verge fusee’ part of that describes the escapement.
What is an escapement?
Sadly, space doesn’t permit a description of how pocket watches work so we’ll have to say that the basic principle of a mechanical movement is to store energy in a spring, then have a mechanism for allowing that energy to travel through the watch in a controlled, constant and regulated fashion. As it leaves or escapes, it drives the wheels and ultimately the hands in a constant and measured fashion – in other words it ‘tells the time’.
There are different techniques used for controlling this orderly use and exit of stored power – it’s called the escapement.
The Main Escapement Types
The Verge
For many centuries the main escapement used was called ‘The Verge’. If you see a pocket watch described as having ‘a verge escapement’, you can probably be sure that it may be some hundreds of years old and certainly it is unlikely to be later than around 1850 in manufacture.
The Cylinder
In the late 18th century watchmakers were searching for mechanisms to improve the accuracy and reliability of their watches and they came up with what’s called ‘The Cylinder Escapement’. This had many advantages over the verge and from the middle of the 19th century it rapidly replaced it in the affections of watchmakers – at least in mainland Europe.
The English Lever
In England, there was a view that ‘the cylinder’ was suspiciously ‘continental’ so they naturally had to invent their own replacement for the verge. This they called the ‘English lever’ which one sees in watches from around the 1830s well into the 20th century. Variations of this are seen in American watches of the 19th century.
The Swiss Lever
During the latter 19th century, the Swiss suddenly decided to take over the world (in watch terms) and came up with two innovations. The first was the Swiss lever escapement, which provided very high quality precision and which continues to be used today in many mechanical watches. The second was the efficient application of mass-production techniques. These had been used in France, The UK and The USA earlier in the century but the Swiss just did it better than anyone else and by the middle of the 20th century had more or less gained the monopoly on global watch production in spite of valiant efforts in the USA and UK to ‘catch-up’.
Embellishments
Of course, many buyers of pocket watches didn’t know or in fact care very much about the technicalities of the escapements. They only cared about either how accurate the watch was or in some cases, how much they could flaunt it as a sign of their wealth. This tendency is not a recent invention of Rolex pocket watches!
Repeaters
If we go back to our couple floundering in their room trying to read the time in the dark, it didn’t take too many fires to convince people that a better approach was needed. Some watchmakers came up with the idea of a watch that chimed every hour just as the church clock did. Several were, no doubt, lynched, as people were constantly woken-up by their watches through the night.
Even an ‘off button’ didn’t solve this, so they came up with the idea of ‘the repeater’. These are watches where by pushing down on a button, the watch will chime the hour then, on a separate time, the number of quarters past the hour. Some early versions only struck the hours and some very up-market models also struck the minutes. These were amongst some of the more prestigious watches made and they remain today highly collectable.
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