For most of the nineteenth century, the wristwatch was women’s jewelry. Serious men carried pocket watches on chains; a “wristlet” was a bracelet that happened to tell time. The gender line was firm enough that early adopters faced ridicule — which makes it striking that within one generation, the pocket watch was effectively extinct.
Last updated: July 22, 2026
Soldiers broke the taboo. Officers coordinating artillery and troop movements discovered that digging a pocket watch out mid-battle was slow and sometimes fatal; by the Boer War and decisively in World War I, fighting men strapped watches to their wrists, often in leather “trench” holders with protective grilles over the glass. Aviation added glamour: in 1904 the pilot Alberto Santos-Dumont, unable to check a pocket watch while flying, asked his friend Louis Cartier for a solution — the resulting Cartier Santos became one of the first purpose-built men’s wristwatches. When veterans came home wearing them, the argument was over.
The next revolution came from Japan on Christmas Day 1969: the Seiko Astron, the first quartz wristwatch. Instead of a balance wheel, it timed itself by a tiny quartz crystal vibrating 32,768 times per second — a frequency chosen because halving it fifteen times yields exactly one second. Quartz was radically more accurate than any mechanical movement and, soon, radically cheaper. The “quartz crisis” of the 1970s devastated the Swiss industry, collapsing hundreds of manufacturers before Switzerland answered in 1983 with the playful, plastic Swatch and rebuilt itself around mechanical watches as luxury rather than necessity.
Digital displays, made possible by the same electronics, put time on calculators, microwaves, and eventually phones — prompting two decades of predictions that the wristwatch would die. Instead it split: smartwatches returned computing to the wrist, while mechanical watches thrive precisely because they are unnecessary — engineering as ornament, the pocket watch’s revenge in miniature.
Every one of those devices, from a hand-wound heirloom to the newest smartwatch, is ultimately checked against the same reference: synchronized atomic time — the time displayed, for any city on Earth, at ellatime.com.
Between the trenches and quartz came the era that made watches trustworthy companions rather than delicate instruments. Rolex’s Oyster case of 1926 sealed the movement against water and dust, and the company proved it the next year by strapping one to swimmer Mercedes Gleitze for a ten-hour English Channel attempt — the watch emerged running, and modern sports-watch marketing was born. Self-winding rotors, shock protection, and luminous dials followed, each removing another reason to leave the watch at home.
Precision itself became the selling point in the mechanical era’s twilight and revival. Chronometer certification — an independent laboratory testing each movement across temperatures and positions for days — separated serious watches from ornaments, and complications multiplied as showcases of craft: perpetual calendars that won’t need adjusting until 2100, moon-phase displays accurate for centuries, minute repeaters that chime the time on demand. None outperform a phone, and that’s exactly the point — the mechanical watch survived by becoming sculpture that happens to keep time.
From trench necessity to quartz revolution to wrist-worn computer, the object has changed entirely while the promise hasn’t: a glance, and you know the time.
Related on Ellatime: How Sundials Work (and How to Read One Correctly) · Before Mechanical Clocks: Water Clocks, Hourglasses, and Candle Time · The Oldest Working Clocks in the World
Further reading: Encyclopaedia Britannica — Clock
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