HOW WATCHES EMERGE

Coelho Latino
11 de mai. de 2021
2 min de leitura

7 TYPES TO SEE THE HOURS

We do not know for sure the date or place of the appearing of the first watch, but we will discover others and their types.

A lot of wooden clocks with hands — Wooden Watches

1 – Sundial:

    Used by Egyptians and Babylonians, it's an instrument showing the time by the shadow of a pointer cast by the sun, on to a plate marked with the hours of the day. Nowadays they are more used in the gardens.

2 - Water clocks or Clepsidra:

 They appeared in Judea, around 600 B.C., it is a water-powered device that works with the help of the force of gravity. The time taken to empty the water tank corresponds, on average, to the same period of time. You can see our Clepsidra.

Water clock or Clepsidra, made of wood and brass — Water clock or Clepsidra

3 - Sand Clocks or Hourglass:

 They appeared in roughly the same period as water clocks. It consists of two glass bubbles that communicate with each other through a small hole that allows a certain amount of sand to pass from one bubble to the other. The time it takes for a bubble to deflate corresponds, on average, always to the same period of time.

Hourglass or sand clock made of glass and worked wood — Hourglass or sand clock

4 - Pocket Watches:

 They appeared around 1500 in the city of Nuremberg, where Peter Henlein manufactured the first pocket watch. With a complex mechanical mechanism that is the precursor to many other mechanical inventions. It allowed to be in operation for 40 hours.

Pocket watch hanging with a path on blurred background — Pocket watch

5 - Pendulum Clocks:

 The first appears in 1656, in the city of The Hague, Holland, by the hands of Christiaan Huygens. It is based on studies of the motion of a pendulum by Galileo Galilei. It is a mechanism that measures time based on the regularity of the oscillation (isochronism) of a pendulum.

Wooden pendulum clock hanging on a wooden plank wall — Pendulum Clocks

6 - Stopwatch or Timer:

The term chronometer was used by Jeremy Thacker of Beverley in 1714 in England, with his invention of a watch installed in a vacuum chamber, to create more accurate navigation. It would serve to measure longitude. But it was not successful.

Old design of Jeremy Thacker's Stopwatch — Timer drawing by Jeremy Thacker

7 - Wristwatch:

 It appears in 1814, created by watchmaker Abraham Louis Breguet, at the behest of the Princess of Naples, Carolina Murat, sister of Napoleon Bonaparte. It was a feminine adornment, which was later popularized among men by the aviator Santos Dumont and which gained a definitive place with the 1st World War, due to its practicality.

Wristwatch with white buckle on a woman's wrist — Wristwatch

You can consult in our collection of Devices, other watches that we have available and if you are interested in themes related to equipment, take a look at our article with Radio Curiosities.


Finally, we recommend a visit to the Clock Museum in Évora.


See you later!!