In today's world, the idea of having to wind your watch for it to keep the proper time seems preposterous. However, the truth is that people had to wind their watches for hundreds of years. The automatic watch, or self-winding watch, was not invented until 1770. It was this innovation that defined modern watch-making and revolutionized the way people around the world keep track of time.
The automatic watch was invented in 1770 by Swiss watchmaker Abraham-Louis Perrelet. In that year, Perrelet developed a self-winding mechanism for pocket watches using the same principles applied in modern pedometers. As the watch-wearer walked, the mechanism moved up and down, thus winding the watch automatically. Just a few years after this invention, the Geneva Society of Arts reported that Perrelet invention allowed the watch to wind sufficiently for eight days of time-keeping with only 15 minutes of walking. And so the automatic watch was born.
Perrelet eventually sold some of his watch designs to fellow watchmaker, Abraham-Louis Breguet. Breguet would make some changes to the design, but his new design was ultimately unreliable and he discontinued the manufacture of his own design. The traction behind the conversion to automatic mechanisms really began when the design was applied to wristwatches. While pocket watches required the watch owner to actually walk around with the watch, wristwatches featuring an automatic mechanism would wind whenever a person moved his or her arm up and down. This meant that virtually all movements resulted in automatic winding. The first person to apply the automatic concept to the wristwatch was a man by the name of John Harwood. Harwood took out patents involving mechanisms that became known as "hammers" or "bumpers." While this mechanism only wound the watch when it was moved in one direction, it did allow for 12 hours of autonomous watch functionality when it was fully wound. This watch was produced in a lot of 30000, and was the first commercially successful automatic watch.
Rolex provided the final push towards the almost universal adoption of the automatic watch. In 1930, the Rolex Watch Company improved John Harwood's mechanism design in order to allow the watch to wind from movement in any direction. The company also improved the capacity of the mainspring to store the energy created by this movement, enabling the watch to run autonomously for up to 35 hours. Rolex's adoption of this technology led many other companies to develop their own automatic watches, and by the 1960s, automatic watches were being sold by countless manufacturers. The Omega automatic watch, the Tissot automatic watch, and the Invicta automatic watch are some notable additions to the world of automatic winding watches.
Today, automatic watches have become ubiquitous, and manually winding watches have become merely curiosities for most people. However, there is truly a rich history behind the invention and development of this now commonplace technology.
