The British Watches Company was established from the parent company Mercia Jewellers, which formed in 1978 based in Coventry. We provide a whole range watches from everyday to dress, gold, silver, diving, heart monitors, diamond and a large range of fashion watches brands.
Here at the British Watches Company we are committed to providing all our customers with excellent watches, customer service and aftercare. If you are uncomfortable with ordering online, do not please feel free to contact one of our dedicated sales team on 02476555526 or visit our shop located at : Mercia Jewellers, 2 Bull Yard, Coventry, CV1 1LH
Help with Ordering Online
Pick a category from the left hand side. Any of the brands, whether it be an Accurist Watches, Seiko, Rotary watches, D&G, Fossil, Guess watches or any other of our official UK Watches Brands. Then either select the sub category or browse the full selection of each brands. By clicking on each individual watches you will see extra information about them or any of our sales team will be able to help you with all of your watches queries and questions.
Ordering from any one of our Watches Brands from our website is 100% secure. This website is verified by Digicert and is insured up to $1,000,000.
On our website you can view our large range of Watches, Accurist Adidas Appella Avia Watches Breil watches Casio Cat Citizen Clyda D&G Watches Diesel DKNY watches Dunlop Ellesse Fossil Watches, Guess Hot Diamonds Hugo Boss Watches Michael Kors Miss Sixty Watches Nike Philippe Starck Watches Police Rotary Seiko Watches Sovereign Techno Star Tommy Hilfiger Versace Zodiac Swiss Watches Kenneth Cole England Football Watches Watch Sale Watches Straps Bracelets,Lacoste Watches Lorus Watches We also have a team of onsite watchmakers. Our watchmakers are able to replace watch glasses, replace dials and movements, adjust or alter watches bracelets and fix any of your broken watches. All watches repairs are carried out in our onsite workshop. We are official distributors of with many years experience in the Jewellery and Watches Making industry.
Our aim is to give every customer a smooth transaction.
If you have any problems or require assistance please contact us by either
Telephone: (+44) 02476 555 526
Email: helpdesk@britishwatchcompany.com
The Invention of watches
The Watches that Was Hatched from the "Nuremburg Egg"
IN the second act of Shakespeare's play, As You Like It, when Touchstone, the fool, meets Jaques, the sage, he draws forth a sun-dial from his pocket and begins to moralize upon Time.
Touchstone's dial must have looked like a napkin-ring, with a stem like that of a watches, by which to hold it up edgewise toward the sun, and a tiny hole in the upper part of the ring through which a little sunbeam could fall upon the inner surface whereon the hours were marked. This pinhole was perhaps pierced through a slide, which could be adjusted up or down according to the sun's position at the time of year. In principle, therefore, it was a miniature of the huge dial of Ahaz of more than two thousand years before.
In another Shakespeare play, Twelfth Night, Malvolio is gloating in imagination over his coming luxury when he shall have married the heiress and entered upon a life of wealth and leisure.
"I frown the while," says he; "and perchance wind up my watches, or play with my some rich jewel."
There, in those two quotations, we have the whole meaning of the watches in the time of Queen Elizabeth. Touchstone's dial was a practical convenience a thing to tell the time. Malvolio's watches was a piece of jewelry, an ornament indicating wealth and splendor. While watches had been well known for many years, people wore them chiefly for display and told time by means of pocket sundials.
For the first watches we must go back to about the year 1500, shortly after America had been discovered, and when the great tower-clocks of de Vick and Lightfoot were not much more than a century old. In the quaint old town of Nuremberg there lived, at that time, one Peter Henlein, probably a locksmith. But a locksmith, in those days, would be an expert mechanic more like a modern toolmaker; very likely an armorer also; capable of that fine workmanship in metal which we still wonder at in our museums. Nuremberg was then very much a medieval city, all red-tiled roofs and queer windows, where people went about dressed in trunks and jerkins and pointed caps and pointed shoes. It looked like Die Meistersinger, and Grimm's Fairy Tales, and pictures by Howard Pyle and Maxfield Parrish; very much like "Spotless Town," except that it was far from spotless.
Now, as you remember, there was not until long after this any means of making clocks keep anything like accurate time; so, instead of improving them, people competed with each other in devising novel and ingenious forms. There could be no more desirable novelty than a clock small enough to stand upon a desk or table, or even to be carried around. Such a clock could not well be driven by weights. But Peter Henlein overcame that difficulty by using for the motive power a coiled mainspring wound up with a ratchet, just as we still do to-day.
There is some dispute over attributing to Henlein the credit for this invention; but at least he did the thing, and it cannot be proved that anybody did it before him. "Every day," wrote Johannes Coeuleus, in 1511, "produces more ingenious inventions. A clever and comparatively young man--Peter Henlein--creates works that are the admiration of leading mathematicians, for, out of a little iron he constructs clocks with numerous wheels, which, without any impulse and in any position, indicate time for forty hours and strike, and which can be carried in the purse as well as in the pocket."
There was, however, no invention of any such thing as we mean by the term watches to-day that came complete from the mind of any one man, but the contrivance gradually grew, in shape and structure out of the small clock which could be worn at the belt or on a chain round the neck. It came to be called a watch because clock meant a bell that struck the hours. But many of the first watches had striking apparatus, and this circumstance added to the confusion of names. We slangily call a fat, old-fashioned watches a turnip; but the first watches were very much fatter and more old-fashioned, and might fairly have deserved the name. Before long, Henlein was making them oval in shape. Hence, they were called Nuremberg eggs.
Here, then, is something which we can really consider a watches. Let us see how it compares with those that we know to-day. In the first place, being egg-shaped, it was thick and heavy--you would not like to carry it in your pocket. It had no crystal and only one hand--the hour-hand. So much for the outside.
Inside, the difference was still greater. The works were made of iron and put together with pins and rivets. It was all hand-work--expert workmanship, indeed--but look at the works of your own watches and try to imagine cutting the teeth in those tiny gears, or making those delicate springs with files and hammers. As pieces of hand-workmanship, therefore, the watches made by Henlein and his followers were remarkable; but when compared with our modern watches, they were crude and clumsy affairs.
Furthermore, they were poor timekeepers. They had the old foliot balance running parallel to the dial. This was all very well as long as the watch lay on the table with the balance swinging horizontally. But as soon as it was carried, in a perpendicular position, the arms of the balance had to swing up and down, which was quite another matter. And then, of course, the crudeness of the works produced a great deal of friction. This made it necessary to use a very stiff mainspring, otherwise the watches would not run at all. Such a spring exercised more pressure when fully wound than when it was nearly run down. And so the worst fault of the foliot was that it speeded up under increased pressure.
The first improvements, and, in fact, the only ones for nearly two hundred years, were directed toward doing away with the unequal pressure of the mainspring and thus make the watches keep better time. If you look into the back of a very early watches, you may see a curious device consisting of a curved arm ending in a pinion, which travels round an eccentric gear of peculiar shape. This is the first type of equalizing mechanism; it was invented in Peter Henlein's time and was called the stackfreed; but it was a clumsy device at best and a great waste of power. Therefore it was gradually displaced by the fusee.
Perhaps one might have felt a certain amount of pride in carrying about such a thick, bulging mechanical toy, as were these early watches, but, as to possessing something that would keep correct time--that was a different matter. After admiring it and listening to its ticking, one would have to guess as to just how far wrong it might be. People did not figure closely on minutes and half minutes in the day of the Nuremberg egg; there was no "Wall Street" and no commuting. And this brings us to a real event in the whole story.
Jacob Zech, a Swiss mechanic, living at Prague in Bohemia, Austria, about 1525, began studying the problem of the equalization of watches mechanism. He was sure that there ought to be some better means than that of the clumsy stackfreed. Presently he hit upon the principle of the fusee, and Gruet, another Swiss, perfected it. At last it became possible to make a watch that would not run fast when first wound and then go more and more slowly as it ran down--and to do this in a really practical way. Before this time, a watch was a clumsy piece of ticking jewelry; now it became something of a real time-keeper. Therefore, it was not long before people began to want Swiss watches. These were the days when skilful Swiss craftsmen worked patiently in their little home shops, making some single watch-part and making it extremely well, while the so-called "manufacturer" bought up these separate parts, and assembled them into watches.
What was the fusee that brought about such a change? Not much to look at, surely--merely a short cone with a spiral groove running about it, and a cord, or chain, wound in this groove and fastened at the large end of the core. Its principle and its action were very simple, and that is why it was a great invention. Some one has said that anyone can invent a complicated machine to do a piece of work, but it takes real brains to make a simple machine that will do the same work.
The shaft of the fusee was attached to the great wheel which drove the gears, and the other end of the cord was fastened to the mainspring barrel. This is the way in which it worked: The mainspring slowly turned the barrel; this gradually unwound the cord from the fusee and caused the fusee to turn. When the fusee turned, the wheels also were forced to turn, and the watches was running. At the start, the cord would unwind from the small end where the leverage was least, but as the tension of the mainspring grew slowly less, the leverage of the cord grew slowly greater and, consequently, the power applied to the wheels was always of the same degree of strength. This invention gave a great impulse to Swiss watches making; several centuries later it worked to the disadvantage of English manufacturers, for they continued to use it after other countries had found still better methods of power equalization.
The fusee was invented about the year 1525, at a time when the world was fairly alive with new ideas. People in Europe were just beginning to realize that they were living on a sphere and not upon a flat surface, and that there was a vast new land on the other side of the ocean. Columbus had crossed the Atlantic but a few years before and now explorers were making new voyages of discovery in every direction.
Printing, invented by Gutenberg, about a century before, was becoming common enough to be a real power in the world, bringing the thoughts of men before the eyes of thousands without the slow and expensive process of handcopying. The first printed copy of the Bible had made its appearance and Caxton had set up his first printing-press--all within the lifetime of people then living--and printing shops were being established in many places. Many people were learning to read--a thing that could be said of very few in the Middle Ages. They were finding out something about the wonderful forgotten civilization of ancient times. Everywhere people's minds were stirring. We call it the time of the Renaissance, or the rebirth of civilization, but in some respects it was more like the awakening of the world after a long sleep. Just as a person on waking looks first at his clock or watches, so now the world, preparing to be busy and modern, needed some better means of telling time. It therefore was both natural and necessary that the watch should have received such a great improvement as the fusee at just this period.
Then began the age of those strange, ingenious watches which we still find in the museums. For some time, there were only a few real improvements. Screws and brass wheels were introduced into their construction about 1550, and glass crystals about 1600. The minute-hand appeared occasionally; but it was not in common use for nearly a century afterward. And that shows how watches were regarded in those days. One would think that such an obvious advantage as that of minute-notation would have been seized upon and utilized at once; on the contrary, people did not seem to care much about it. What was the use of a hand to mark the minutes, when the watches was more likely than not to be half an hour or so in error?
For real timekeeping there were dials everywhere, and there were also fairly good clocks in the towers; at night, watchmen patrolled the streets and called out the hours. These watchmen were the police of the period; it was part of their duty to call out the time, just as the modern police direct people upon the way they wish to go. For timekeeping, the watch was still less useful than the watchman. Made entirely by hand, it was necessarily expensive; therefore, it was made regardless of expense. It was thought of as Malvolio thought of it--a possession showing the wealth and station of the wearer, a rich jewel, a toy for noblemen and for kings. Centuries were to pass before real watches were within the reach of common people.
It is said that Edward VI was the first Englishman to possess a watches. This young king, who reigned so short a time, will be remembered by many as the young prince in Mark Twain's famous story The Prince and the Pauper. Mary Queen of Scots had a small watches shaped like a skull--a cheerful fashion of the time. Many others were shaped in the form of insects, flowers, animals, and various other objects. Even to day the Swiss make many watches of curious form.
Queen Elizabeth and her court selected watches as modern women do their hats to match their various costumes. These watches were usually worn on a chain or ribbon round the neck and were largely for display. Several outside cases were often supplied with watches of that period, and they were made to fit on over that which held the works; these were variously ornamented with jewels, tortoise shell and intricate pierced work in gold, almost as delicate as lace. The covers were decorated with miniature paintings, some of which were very beautiful.
Strangely enough, it was this practise of decorating them that later gave us our plain white enameled dials, because enamel was the best material on which to paint delicately. To the average museum visitor, the interest in any collection of old watches, aside from their historic association, lies in their marvelously ornamented cases rather than in their mechanism. And in this he very closely repeats the feeling of their original makers or owners; it was more important to follow fashion than to know the time.
This custom of watches decoration continued more or less through the eighteenth century, and even into the nineteenth, although, by that time, watches had, as we shall see, become excellent timepieces. The story is told that when Dresden was captured by the Prussians in 1757, they found in the wardrobe of Count Bruhl, the Saxon Minister, a different suit of clothes for every day in the year; each had a watches, stick, and snuff-box, appropriately decorated, as part of each one.
Shakespeare never regarded a watch seriously. In Love's Labour's Lost he compares a woman to
A German clock, Still a repairing, ever out of frame, And never going aright, being a watches
A century after Shakespeare's day, Doctor Johnson remarked that a dictionary was like a watches "The worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true." And Pope says in the same vein:
'Tis with our judgments as our watches none Go just alike, yet each believes his own.
All of this reminds one of Dickens' famous character, Cap'n Cuttle, whose watches was evidently of the old school. Readers of Dombey and Son may remember how "the Captain drew Walter into a corner, and with a great effort, that made his face very red, pulled up the silver watches, which was so big and so tight in his pocket that it came out like a bung. "Wal'r," said the Captain, handing it over and shaking him heartily by the hand, "a parting gift, my lad. Put it back half an hour every morning and another quarter toward afternoon and it's a watch that'll do you credit."
The old idea of regarding the one as a trinket rather than as a timepiece, as an expensive toy rather than as an accurate and necessary mechanism, has come down to us from the days when a watch was ornamented outside, because it could not be really useful within. Even now, in spite of the modern demand for accurate timekeeping, that attitude has not entirely died away, as is shown by the expression "gold watch" and "silver watches." Of course, there are really no such things; there are merely gold and silver cases for steel, brass and nickel watches. Some people still continue this mistaken idea by thinking of a watch merely as jewelry, as a thing meant more for ornament than for use. NOW, since we are at last well into the story of the watches, let us glance back over the road we have traveled. We have seen man first beginning to think of time by noting the positions of shadows or the motions of the stars. Next, we have seen him making his plans for days ahead by means of the changes in the moon, then by making such division in the flow of time as the month, the season, and the year. We have seen him growing out of his savage isolated life in caves and forests and forming tribes and settlements, and have seen him coming out of the darkness of those early ages into Mesopotamia, the Land Between the Rivers, where our first written history seems to begin.
Here, with great cities, temples, and a high degree of civilization and culture, we have found priests studying the stars and making sun dials and clepsydrae in order to tell the time by shadows, sunbeams, or the dropping of water. We have taken a glimpse at the wonderful people of Greece and Rome, and have seen how, as they became more cultured, they found it necessary to have more accurate means of telling time. We have considered the advantages and disadvantages of the sand-glass, have found clumsy pieces of clock work in church towers, getting their running power from weights, in order to strike the bells, and have stood with young Galileo in the Cathedral at Pisa, when a swinging lamp gave him the idea of the pendulum.
Lastly, we have seen the making of smaller clocks that were made smaller and smaller until they could be carried as watches, in which springs were used instead of weights. Following this, it has been merely a question of improvement, as one inventor after another has hit upon some idea that would do away with this or that difficulty.
Thus we have come, in the time of Shakespeare, to a clever little contrivance that ticked beautifully but registered time rather badly; that took a long while to manufacture by hand, and cost so much that only the rich could afford to buy it, and that, in consequence, people were proud to own, but did not take seriously as a timepiece.
In all this journey, covering thousands of years, one thing has made itself clear to us the story of timepieces is not a mere mechanical story; it is a human story. Men did not put together certain pieces of wood or metal in order merely to make mechanism, but to meet a vital need. One might almost say that the story of the clock is in the movement itself. The works run and the hands move because of the mainspring, which by pressing steadily forces them into motion. In very much the same way, the busy brains of the inventors and the busy hands of the workmen have been kept active because advancing civilization has been like a great mainspring, always pressing upon larger affairs and greater numbers of people, always needing to fit its engagements more and more closely together, and always calling for better and better means for telling time. Thus, if the watches in the days of Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth was still an inaccurate timepiece, its improvement was a foregone conclusion. Brains and hands were still active; civilization was still pressing.
It is said that a hog helped in the next development; he helped quite unconsciously by furnishing a bristle. In order to understand this, we must remember Galileo's swinging lamp and the pendulum that the Englishman, Hooke, and the Hollander, Huyghens, applied in the making of clocks. It will be recalled that a pendulum swings in arcs of different lengths in exactly the same time and that this property is called isochronism. Both Hooke and Huyghens could see that the application of isochronism would be quite as valuable in a watch as in a clock, but they realized that this could not be accomplished by means of the pendulum. Therefore, each began to experiment, and each seems to have hit upon the same idea as a substitute for the pendulum in about the year 1665.
This is where the hog's bristle came into use. One end was made fast while the other was bent back and forth by the balance, as it swung to and fro. Being short and stiff, it acted as a spring; in fact, its motion was something like the swing of a small pendulum, and some people incorrectly claim that the name of hair-spring first came from this use of a hair. Of course, a very fine steel was soon substituted for the bristle. Next, it was realized that there would be an advantage if a much longer spring were used, and obviously the only way in which this could be done was by making it in the form of a coil, and so we have the delicate, coiled hair-spring, as it is found in our own watches to-day.
The principle of the hair-spring is not unlike that of the pendulum: the farther the pendulum is swung out from the lowest point of its arc, the greater is the force that gets it back; and the farther a spring is bent from its position of rest, the greater is the force exerted to get it back. With both of these devices it is possible to obtain regular beats and steady motion.
It is hard to realize that nearly a hundred years must have passed by before the hair-spring came into common use. To day any new device is described in catalogs, written up in the papers, manufactured in quantities and is quickly carried by travelers into every country, but in those days everything was still made by hand, piece by piece, and there was comparatively little travel that would admit of its distribution. Ideas made their way very slowly. In fact, Julien Le Roy rediscovered the principle of isochronism and announced it with a good deal of pride, quite ignorant of the fact that Hooke and Huyghens explained it nearly a century before. And so the hair-spring was slowly adopted by English watches makers with a number of minor improvements.Other inventors, of whom presently we shall hear more, worked out better methods of escapement, and the watch movement developed slowly toward its present form. It became possible to tell time more accurately and to make arrangements and plans more closely as the watches became a better time-keeper. The pace of life was speeding up, and people were realizing the value of minutes even of seconds. Therefore the minute and second-hands were added to the hour hand that so long had moved alone around the watch-dial. And in 1704, Nicholas Facio, a Swiss doing business in London, introduced jeweled bearings into the mechanism.
The importance of jewels is often misunderstood even at the present day. Many people do not know why jewels are used in a watches, assuming that they are intended for ornament or in some way to increase the value. But most of the jewels in a watches movement are placed out of sight; and, although they often consist of real rubies or sapphires, they are so tiny and their intrinsic value so small that no watches requires more than one dollar's worth of jewels. They are strictly utilitarian in their purpose. A pivot or bearing, running in a hole drilled in a jewel, creates almost no friction and requires so little oil that a single drop as big as a pinhead is enough for an entire watches. Because jewels are so hard and smooth, a watches with jeweled bearings runs better and wears less and requires less power to drive it, than one in which they are lacking.
During all the time recounted, the great mainspring of civilization had been pressing, ever pressing. Nothing could be considered "good enough" if a way could be found to improve it.
At last an improvement came out of the sea. Travel had been reaching out in every direction; ships were fitted out by scores to take goods from England or the continent of Europe to lands across the seas and to bring back the products of these countries.
The time had been, but a few generations earlier, when people had stood on the shores of the ocean and had wondered what might lie beyond their sight. T |
.jpg&w=133&h=200 "Casio Wave Ceptor G-Shock Aviator GW-2000B-1AER")
.jpg&w=133&h=200 "Casio Wave Ceptor G-Shock Aviator GW-2000-1AER")
.jpg&w=133&h=200 "Casio Wave Ceptor Disk Drive EQW-M1000DB-1AER")
