A Short History of the Wristwatch

For centuries, portable timekeeping meant the pocket watch. The wristwatch began as a fashionable piece of jewellery for women, and it took a few decades and a world war to make it mainstream for everyone.

Early wristwatches appeared in the nineteenth century, often as small watches fitted to bracelets for women. In the early 1900s, Cartier's Santos, designed for the aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont around 1904, showed that a watch on the wrist was practical for flying, where fumbling for a pocket watch was awkward.

The First World War made the wristwatch popular with soldiers. Officers needed to coordinate attacks and read the time quickly, and so-called trench watches, which often had protective grilles over the crystal, became common. Men who had once seen wristwatches as feminine adopted them in large numbers.

In 1926 Rolex launched the Oyster, with a screwed-down crown and case that made the watch water-resistant, and in 1931 it added the Perpetual rotor, which made automatic winding practical. These advances helped turn the wristwatch from a delicate accessory into a rugged everyday tool.

The mid-twentieth century saw specialist watches for divers, pilots and explorers, followed by the quartz revolution of the 1970s that made accurate watches cheap. Mechanical watches then re-emerged as luxury objects.

Today, wristwatches are tools, status symbols and works of craft. Knowing the history makes it easier to see why design details such as crowns, bezels and cases look the way they do.