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Watch
A watch is a small portable clock that
displays the current time and sometimes the current day,
date, month and year. In modern times they are usually
worn on the wrist, although before the 20th century most
were pocket watches, which had covers and were carried
separately, often in a pocket, and hooked to a watch chain.
Current watches are often digital watches,
using a piezoelectric crystal, usually quartz, as an oscillator
(see quartz clock).
In earlier times mechanical timepieces
were used, powered by a spring wound regularly by the
user. The invention of "Automatic" or "Self-Winding"
watches allowed for a constant winding without special
action from the wearer: it works by an irregular weight,
called a winding rotor, that rotates to the movement of
the wearer's body, automatically winding the watch.
Watches may be collectible; they are
often made of precious metals, and can be considered an
article of jewelry.
Types Of Watch
Pocket Clock
The first necessity for portability
in time keeping 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 timezones; by comparing the midday time
of the local longitude to a European meridian (usually
Paris or Greenwich), a sailor could know how far he was
from home. However, the process was notoriously unreliable
until the introduction of John Harrison's chronometer.
For that reason, most maps from the 15th century to c.1800
have precise latitudes but distorted longitudes.
The first 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-clockes" was enabled through the
development of reliable springs and escapement mechanisms,
which allowed clockmakers to compress a timekeeping device
into a small, portable compartment. It is rumoured that
Henry VIII (the portrait of Henry VIII at this link shows
the medallion thought to be the back of his watch) had
a pocket clock which he kept on a chain around his neck.
However, these watches only had an hour hand - a minute
hand would have been useless considering the inaccuracy
of the watch mechanism. Eventually, miniaturization of
these spring-based designs allowed for accurate portable
timepieces which worked well even at sea. Aaron Lufkin
Dennison founded Waltham Watch Company in 1850, which
was the pioneer of the industrial manufacturing by interchangeable
parts, the American System of Watch Manufacturing.
Wrist Watch
Breitling Navitimer Montbrillant, a
typical pilot watch. Quantum on hand, day of the week,
month, sliding rule, chronograph certified.The wristwatch
was invented by Patek Philippe at the end of the 19th
century. It was however considered a woman's accessory.
It was not until the beginning of the 20th century that
the Brazilian inventor Alberto Santos-Dumont, who had
difficulty checking the time while in his first aircraft
(Dumont was working on the invention of the aeroplane),
asked his friend Louis Cartier for a watch he could use
more easily. Cartier gave him a leather-band wristwatch
from which Dumont never separated. Being a popular figure
in Paris, Cartier was soon able to sell these watches
to other men. During the First World War, 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 pocket watch. In addition, as increasing
numbers of officers were killed in the early stages of
the war, NCOs promoted to replace them often did not have
pocket watches (traditionally a middle-class item out
of the reach of ordinary working-class soldiers), and
so relied on the army to provide them with timekeepers.
As the scale of battles increased, artillery and infantry
officers were required to synchronise watches in order
to conduct attacks at precise moments, whilst artillery
officers were in need of a large number of accurate timekeepers
for rangefinding and gunnery. Army contractors began to
issue reliable, cheap, mass-produced wristwatches which
were ideal for these purposes. When the war ended, demobilised
European and American officers were allowed to keep their
wristwatches, helping to popularise the items amongst
middle-class Western civilian culture. Today, nearly every
Westerner wears a watch on his wrist, a direct result
of the First World War.
Complicated Watch
A complicated watch has one or more
functionalities beyond basic time-keeping capabilities;
such a functionality is called a complication. Two popular
complications are the chronograph complication, which
is the ability of the watch movement to function as a
stopwatch, and the moonphase complication, which is a
display of the lunar phase. Among watch enthusiasts, complicated
watches are especially collectible.
Chronographs And Chronometers
The similar-sounding terms chronograph
and chronometer are often confused, although they mean
altogether different things. A chronograph is a type of
complication, as explained under the heading "Complicated
Watch." A chronometer is a watch or clock whose movement
has been tested and certified to operate within a certain
standard of accuracy. The concepts are different but not
mutually exclusive; a watch can be a chronograph, a chronometer,
both, or neither.
Electromechanical Watches
The first use of electrical power in
watches was as a source of energy to replace the mainspring,
and therefore to remove the need for winding. The first
battery-powered watch, the Hamilton Electric 500, was
released in 1957 by the Hamilton Watch Company of Lancaster,
Pennsylvania.
Quartz Analogue watch
The quartz analogue watch is an electronic
watch that uses a piezoelectric quartz crystal as its
timing element, coupled to a mechanical movement that
drives the hands. The first prototypes were made by the
CEH research laboratory in Switzerland in 1962. The first
quartz watch to enter production was the Seiko 35 SQ Astron,
which appeared in 1969. There are also several variations
of the quartz watch as to what actually powers the movement.
There are solar powered, kinetically powered, and battery
powered. Solar powered quartz watches are powered by available
light. Kinetic powered quartz watches are powered by the
motion of the wearer's arm turning a rotating weight,
which in turn, turns a generator to supply power. The
third and most common power source is the battery. Watch
batteries come in many forms, the most common of which
are silver oxide and lithium.
Digital Watches
Cheaper electronics permitted the popularisation
of the digital watch (an electronic watch with a numerical,
rather than analogue, display) in the second half of the
20th century. They were seen as the great new thing. Douglas
Adams, in the introduction of his novel The Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy, would say that humans were 'so amazingly
primitive that they still think digital watches are a
pretty neat idea'.
The first digital watch, a Pulsar prototype
in 1970, was developed jointly by Hamilton Watch Company
and Electro-Data. A retail version of the Pulsar was put
on sale in 1972 It had a red light-emitting diode (LED)
display. LED displays were soon superseded by liquid crystal
displays (LCDs), which used less battery power. The first
LCD watch with a six-digit LCD was the 1973 Seiko 06LC,
although various forms of early LCD watches with a four-digit
display were marketed as early as 1972 including the 1972
Gruen Teletime LCD Watch.
In addition to the function of a timepiece,
digital watches can have additional functions like a chronograph,
calculator, video game etc.
Digital watches have not replaced analog
watches, despite their greater reliability and lower cost.
In fact, because digital watches are so cheap, analog
watches are often worn as status symbols. For others,
analog watches are just easier to read.
Fashionable Watches
At the end of the 20th century, Swiss
watch makers were seeing their sales go down as analog
clocks were considered obsolete. They joined forces with
designers from many countries to reinvent the Swiss watch.
The result was that they could considerably
reduce the pieces and production time of an analog watch.
In fact it was so cheap that if a watch broke it would
be cheaper to throw it away and buy a new one than to
repair it. They founded the Swiss Watch company (Swatch)
and called graphic designers to redesign a new annual
collection.
This is often used as a case study in
design schools to demonstrate the commercial potential
of industrial and graphic design.
Advanced watches
As miniaturized electronics become cheaper,
more and more functionalities have been inserted into
watches. Watches have been developed containing calculators,
video games, digital cameras, keydrives, and cellular
phones. In the early 1980s Seiko marketed a watch with
a television receiver in it, although at the time television
receivers were too bulky to fit in a wristwatch, and the
actual receiver and its power source were in a book-sized
box with a cable that ran to the wristwatch. In the early
2000's, a self-contained wristwatch television receiver
came on the market, with a strong enough power source
to provide one hour of viewing.
Several companies have attempted to develop
a computer contained in a WristWatch, including an IBM
product that ran Linux and a Fossil product that ran PalmOS
(see also wearable computer). As of 2004, the only programmable
computer watch to have made it to market is the Seiko
Ruputer, although many digital watches come with extremely
sophisticated data management software built in.
A recent development is the radio controlled
wristwatch or as they are sometimes called "atomic
watches". These wristwatches receive a radio signal
from the National Institute of Standards and Technology
located in Colorado in the United States. This radio signal
tells the radio wristwatch exactly what time it is, precise
to a fraction of a nanosecond. About 4 times per day a
radio wristwatch will check this radio signal and reset
itself to the exact time. It will also reset itself when
daylight savings time changes. These watches always know
what time it is.
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