Time on Your Wrist: The History of the Wristwatch - Episode 16

00:00:01: There's something I want you to think about before we start.

00:00:03: Somewhere near you right now, on your wrist or in a bedside table or in the pocket and phone there is this device that does things like spend thousands of years trying to figure out how to do reliably.

00:00:15: It's measuring time Not big philosophical times not kind that keeps philosophy up at night.

00:00:21: The small practical everyday kind.

00:00:23: A kind tells when to leave When to arrive When something started.

00:00:27: How long has it been going?

00:00:30: You probably glanced at the time today dozens of times.

00:00:33: Without consciously registering most of those glances, it's become that embedded – THAT AUTOMATIC!

00:00:38: The small act checking your wrist or phone is so routine and barely registers as an action at all.

00:00:46: For most human history, you couldn't do this.

00:00:50: You could not carry time with you.

00:00:52: Time was something fixed in a landscape—in position of sun, bells church tower cycles tides seasons.

00:00:59: It lived in the world, not on your person.

00:01:02: And if you were somewhere the sun wasn't visible or the bells couldn't be heard.

00:01:06: You simply didn't know what time it was precisely.

00:01:09: The wristwatch changed that...it made time personal portable something you wore And today I want to tell you the story of how it got your wrist.

00:01:17: Because they are through war, Through the hands of women workers in Swiss valleys, Through trenches from WWI where men who had considered wristwatches effeminate suddenly found them be the difference between life and death.

00:01:30: Through aviation & sport & space travel & digital revolution.

00:01:35: It's a beautiful story and i think its worth knowing.

00:01:37: so get comfortable!

00:01:39: Im Alexandra Welcome To The Hidden Life Of Things.

00:01:42: Let me start at the beginning.

00:01:43: Not the very beginning, not sundials and water clocks though those are fascinating in their own right?

00:01:49: let me start with the pocket watch because The Pocket Watch is the direct ancestor of the wristwatch And understanding why people carried time In their pockets for several centuries tells you something important about Why they moved to the wrist was so significant.

00:02:03: The Mechanical Clock, a device that measures time through the controlled release of stored energy using a series of gears and an escapement mechanism was developed in medieval Europe.

00:02:15: Probably in late thirteenth century?

00:02:17: The earliest mechanical clocks were enormous Tower clocks built into church steeples and civic buildings.

00:02:23: they were expensive and fixed.

00:02:25: They told their community what time it is by striking bells.

00:02:28: Time was public shared announced.

00:02:31: Making clocks smaller, small enough to carry required advances in miniaturization that took centuries to develop.

00:02:38: The spring-driven clock which replaced the heavy hanging weights of early tower clocks with a coiled spring as energy source made smaller portable clocks possible.

00:02:47: By the sixteenth century Spring driven clocks small enough be worn or carried were being made in Germany and Switzerland.

00:02:54: These early portable timepieces were more jewellery than instrument, honestly.

00:02:58: Large often all-need egg shaped or drum shaped objects worn as pendants or carried in pouches.

00:03:03: they are not particularly accurate.

00:03:05: a good one might drift by fifteen minutes of day which my modern standards is essentially useless But they were portable time.

00:03:12: A person could carry the approximate hour with them.

00:03:15: By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, The pocket watch had evolved into a form Most of us recognised from previous dramas Around flat case usually hinged to protect face Attached so chain that fixed it was waistcoat or jacket.

00:03:28: Accuracy has improved dramatically.

00:03:30: A well-made pocketwatch by the eighteenth century Could keep time within one minute.

00:03:35: Navigators used them to calculate longitude at sea, knowing the exact time.

00:03:39: in Greenwich while observing the position of the sun told you precisely how far east or west of the Greenwich you were.

00:03:45: Pocket watches in this context are navigation instruments.

00:03:49: they where how age of exploration could be precise rather than nearly approximate.

00:03:54: through the nineteenth century The pocket watch was a marker status and respectability for such an established presence in world.

00:04:02: A gentleman had a pocket watch.

00:04:04: It was part of the vocabulary how a well-ordered person presented themselves.

00:04:09: The watch chain, across a waistcoat ,was as much a signifier for character than the cut of a coat.

00:04:15: And women?

00:04:16: Women had wristwatches!

00:04:18: Small delicate often highly jewelled watches worn in a bracelet designed as accessories decorative and functional.

00:04:25: The wristwatched in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was considered in the polite slightly condescending language of the era a women's thing, an ornament.

00:04:35: A pretty piece of jewelry that happened to tell time.

00:04:38: Men wore pocket watches because they were serious instruments for serious people.

00:04:43: and then came nineteen fourteen.

00:04:45: The first world war which began August nineteen fourteen And did not end until November nineteen eighteen Was among its many terrible distinctions.

00:04:53: the First modern War.

00:04:55: Modern innocence that it.

00:04:56: violence was industrial in scale and precision.

00:04:59: Modern in the sense that it required coordination between enormous numbers of people moving across vast distances, conducting operations that depended on everyone doing specific things at specific moments.

00:05:10: Coordination required time.

00:05:12: A military offensive during World War I was a precisely timed operation.

00:05:16: Artillery would fire for a specific duration say at five thirty am for thirty minutes to break up enemy wire and suppress defensive positions.

00:05:24: Then at six

00:05:25: a.m.,

00:05:25: exactly, infantry would advance.

00:05:27: If the infantry moved at five fifty-five They'd advance under their current artillery fire.

00:05:32: if they move at six on five The enemy would have had five minutes to recover from bombardment and return to positions.

00:05:38: Their margin for error was minutes sometimes seconds And that margin measured in lives.

00:05:43: Officers needed to know the time, not approximately precisely.

00:05:47: And they needed it.

00:05:48: while their hands were occupied holding a rifle directing men signaling using a map crawling through mud reaching into our pocket for watch was not always possible.

00:05:58: It's sometimes impossible and in a trench In the chaos of an advance dark before dawn fumbling with a watch chain Was a gesture that could kill you.

00:06:08: The solution is already in existence.

00:06:10: just considered unmasculine Officers, initially British officers and then offices across the Allied and Central Power armies began strapping their pocket watches to their wrists using leather straps.

00:06:21: Sometimes purpose-made straps sometimes improvised with whatever leather or cord was available.

00:06:27: The wristwatch wasn't yet a standard military issue.

00:06:30: it was personal adaptation A practical response to a practical problem.

00:06:35: By nineteen fifteen and nineteen sixteen, purpose-built military wristwatches were being produced at scale.

00:06:40: The key features were different from civilian watches – they needed to be robust, legible in low light ,and resistant mud water & temperature extremes of the western front.

00:06:50: Luminous paint radium based was applied to hands and numerals so that time could be read in a darkened trench without using a light.

00:07:00: Wire lugs, small loops of metal soldered to the case held leather straps firmly.

00:07:05: The face was designed to be read at a glance from any angle without needing to adjust your

00:07:08: hand.".

00:07:09: The trench watch as it became known was a functional object designed under extreme conditions for extreme purposes and men who used them came home having worn a watch on their wrist through years of intense experience did not take off when they got back.

00:07:26: The wristwatch came home from the First World War as a man's accessory.

00:07:31: The stigma of femininity had been annihilated by the Western Front.

00:07:36: A generation of men had worn wristwatches in conditions that made any question of social acceptability completely irrelevant.

00:07:42: After nineteen eighteen, the wristwatch was simply what you wore –a pocket watch never fully recovered.

00:07:47: Here is part of this story I think deserves much more attention than it usually gets.

00:07:51: While men were wearing watches on the trenches women were making them.

00:07:54: The Swiss watch industry, which had been the dominant force in precision time-piece manufacturing since the eighteenth century was in its operational reality built substantially on female labour.

00:08:06: Not at the executive level not in public facing roles but workshops where actual work of watchmaking happened.

00:08:13: Swiss watchmaking in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries operated through a system called établissage.

00:08:19: Essentially, a cottage industry model where components were distributed to workers in their homes.

00:08:32: Workers would receive components, assemble specific subsections and return them.

00:08:36: The whole system was intensely divided.

00:08:38: different workers specialized in different component with different operations.

00:08:43: the work of assembling and finishing watch movements.

00:08:46: tiny precise incredibly delicate work Was done in significant proportion by women?

00:08:52: The work required fine motor skills patience excellent close vision And the ability to walk for long hours and careful concentrated attention.

00:08:59: Women were paid less than men for this work.

00:09:02: they were not celebrated for it.

00:09:03: The famous names on Swiss watches, Patek Philippe, Vacheron Constantinne, Nongine, Rolex was the name of men who owned and managed to market them.

00:09:15: In La Chaux-de-Fonds a city in Switzerland that is essentially the watchmaking capital so dedicated to the industry that its entire urban layout was designed in a grid specifically to maximise natural light and workshop spaces.

00:09:30: Women made up a substantial portion of their watchmaking

00:09:32: workforce.".

00:09:33: The city itself, with it's rational discipline grid-of streets designed around the light requirements for precision craft work is UNESCO World Heritage Site today.

00:09:42: It is, in a sense, a monument to this industry And the industry was built by hands that history forgot to name.

00:09:49: There's also a darker dimension to this story that I want to name plainly.

00:09:53: The luminous paint applied first world war and interwar era watch dials, To make them readable in darkness was based on radium.

00:10:01: Radium is radioactive.

00:10:02: This not fully understood in the nineteen tens and nineteen twenties But danger became tragically clear through the story of the radium girls In the United States and factories New Jersey & Illinois.

00:10:13: Young women were employed to paint watch dial with radium-based luminous paints.

00:10:18: The work required a fine brush tip and workers were actually instructed to shape their brushes with their lips.

00:10:24: To put the brush in their mouth, pull it to a fine point dip it into the radium paint apply it to the dial over an overall day.

00:10:31: .The women where told that pain was safe.

00:10:33: they sometimes said it is beneficial even.

00:10:36: Radium was fashionable in early twentieth century appearing health tonics beauty products with kind of quack enthusiasm.

00:10:44: It Was Not Safe.

00:10:45: The women absorbed radium into their bodies and radium, once ingested behaves like calcium.

00:10:50: And it deposits itself in bone.

00:10:52: the woman began to suffer there.

00:10:54: bones deteriorated.

00:10:55: several developed radiation related cancers.

00:10:58: they died.

00:10:59: a group of them the radium girls as They became known sued Their employers In the late nineteen twenties.

00:11:04: the case was one Of the first major legal challenges around occupational safety an employer responsibility for workplace harm.

00:11:12: They won, the settlement was modest and came too late to those who had already died.

00:11:16: but the legal precedent that employers have a duty of care to workers regarding known work place hazards were significant.

00:11:24: There is what has this history in it?

00:11:27: not just the trenches, workshops ,the hands made movements.

00:11:30: The women painted the dials paid price.

00:11:33: no one told them they would pay.

00:11:36: I want to spend some time with Switzerland specifically because the Swiss watch industry is not just an industry, it's a cultural institution.

00:11:43: A national identity and in the twentieth century It became the site of one of the most significant industrial battles In The History Of Consumer Goods.

00:11:52: Le Chaudiffon And Les Locles The Twin Cities And Swiss Watchmaking In The Jura Mountains Developed Their Industries In The Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries In Conditions That Were Anyway Almost Accidental.

00:12:04: The Drurr Valley winters were long and harsh.

00:12:06: Agricultural work was limited for months at a time, watchmaking which required no special materials could be done indoors by single personal family with relatively small set of specialized tools.

00:12:18: It spread through the valley way a craft spreads when there is time need and gradual accumulation shared knowledge.

00:12:25: By late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Swiss Watchmaking had achieved level quality precision that was effectively unmatched anywhere in the world.

00:12:35: The names that emerged from this period, Patek Philippe founded in Geneva in eighteen thirty-nine, Longin established in Saint-Immyère in eighteen.

00:12:43: thirties.

00:12:44: two, Omega from Biel and Bien in eighteen.

00:12:46: forty.

00:12:47: eight.

00:12:47: IWC found it in Schaffhausen in eighteen sixty-eight Rolex registered in Geneva.

00:12:52: nineteen fifteen.

00:12:53: These were not just watch companies.

00:12:54: there are institutions of extraordinary precision craft, each developing their own particular approaches to accuracy and reliability for the design of a movement.

00:13:04: A Swiss mechanical watch but good one made with care is a staggering object when you stop thinking about it.

00:13:09: A modern mechanical wristwatch movement might contain anywhere from a hundred-and-thirty to five-hundred or more individual components – tiny gears, springs, levers, jewels, synthetic rubies used as bearings because they are hardness assembled by hand or by precision machines into a mechanism that fits inside the case smaller than a coin.

00:13:30: The mainspring, when wound, stores energy.

00:13:33: The escapement – A rocking lever that engages with their escape wheel in a precise tiktok rhythm releases that energy in controlled increments.

00:13:41: The balance wheel oscillates back and forth typically at frequencies of six-eight or ten beats per second regulating the release.

00:13:48: Every gear on the chain is calculated to transmit motion at specific ratio translating the beats of the balance wheel into rotation at exactly the right speed.

00:13:58: It is in a most literal sense, a machine for measuring time built to tolerances measured in fractions over millimetre designed to function continuously for decades if properly maintained accurate within seconds per day.

00:14:11: and through mid-twentieth century Swiss watches dominated world market.

00:14:16: They were precision instruments, status symbols, luxury objects and utterly practical tools simultaneously.

00:14:23: A good watch meant something – it said something about the person who wore it ,about care they took with important things .

00:14:30: About their relationship to time and quality in a longer view.

00:14:34: And then In the nineteen seventies The industry nearly died.

00:14:38: This is part of story where Swiss Watch Industry encountered Something that threatened To destroy It entirely and I think it's one of the most interesting industrial stories in the twentieth century.

00:14:49: In nineteen sixty-nine, a Japanese company called Seiko released The Astron – the world's first commercially available quartz wristwatch.

00:14:56: Instead of mechanical movement powered by warm spring, The Astron used tiny quartz crystal oscillating at eight thousand one hundred ninety two vibrations per second regulated by circuit to keep time.

00:15:07: The accuracy was extraordinary.

00:15:09: where a good mechanical watch might gain or lose seconds per day, a quartz watch gained or lost seconds per month.

00:15:16: It was dramatically more accurate — it required no winding—it was cheaper to produce and smaller.

00:15:22: The Swiss watch industry watched this development and initially failed to grasp its implications.

00:15:27: They had invested generations in the perfection of mechanical watchmaking.

00:15:31: they have the finest craftspeople…the most refined movements...the most prestigious names.

00:15:36: Quartz seemed like a curiosity, a gadget.

00:15:40: By the mid-Nineteen seventies, The Swiss industry was in crisis.

00:15:43: Quartz watches from Japan and Hong Kong were flooding the global market at prices Swiss manufacturers couldn't match.

00:15:50: Companies that had operated for over a century were failing.

00:15:53: A number of people employed in Swiss watchmaking dropped from over ninety thousand in early nineteen seventies to around thirty thousand by the early nineteen eighties.

00:16:03: The carnage was real and significant.

00:16:05: The swatch was not trying to compete on prestige or precision, it was competing on personality.

00:16:30: On color – the idea that a watch could be fashion accessory something you earned several of and chose to match your mood or outfit.

00:16:39: It's cheap enough to be disposable in way that mechanical watches never were.

00:16:44: The swatch worked!

00:16:45: It sold in enormous quantities.

00:16:47: It stabilized the Swiss industry and gave it a financial foundation to continue investing in high-end mechanical watches.

00:16:53: that had always been its real identity.

00:16:56: And, this high end market did something unexpected.

00:16:59: as the twentieth century ended when the twenty first began – it grew!

00:17:04: As quartz watches became ubiquitous and cheap….

00:17:06: …as digital watches appeared... ...as phones began displaying time.. ..as clocks appeared on every device everywhere….

00:17:12: The Mechanical Watch lost its functional purpose entirely.

00:17:16: Nobody needed a mechanical watch to know the time.

00:17:19: Your phone told you, your computer told you… The microwave told you!

00:17:23: And somehow as the functional need evaporated... ...the desire for a mechanical Watch grew.

00:17:29: Not despite that fact our Phone is more accurate But because of it, the Mechanical Watch became something else entirely A piece of craft –a connection to human ingenuity across centuries.

00:17:40: I think this works without battery and software without any external power source except the motion of a human wrist.

00:17:48: Something that your grandfather might have warned, or that you may one day pass to someone who cares.

00:17:55: A mechanical watch in twenty-twenty six is not a timekeeping device.

00:17:59: it's a philosophical object an argument worn on the wrist about what we choose value In world where everything is digital replaceable and cheaply made.

00:18:08: The watch today exists more forms than at point And I think it's worth taking a moment with some of them because each one tells you something about what we expect from time and the objects used to measure.

00:18:22: The digital watch arrived commercially in the early nineteen seventies beginning with LED displays, those bright red numerals that required a button press to illuminate as they drain batteries so fast... ...and evolving into LCD displays still common today.

00:18:36: The Casio F-Ninety One W, introduced in nineteen ninety one became arguably the most successful watching history.

00:18:43: Hundreds of millions sold still in production are available for a few pounds or dollars.

00:18:48: light weight accurate practically indestructible within ordinary life with a battery that lasts years.

00:18:55: Sports watch devolved through the latter half of the twentieth century to meet specific needs.

00:18:59: that dive watch water resistant to significant depths without rotating bezel to track elapsed hand underwater.

00:19:05: Their chronograph are watched with a built-in stopwatch function used by pilots, racing drivers and navigators.

00:19:11: The field watch builds for legibility and durability in outdoor conditions descended directly from the military watches of the First World War.

00:19:19: Each type is functional response to specific demand And each has developed its own aesthetics Its own traditions It's own devoted communities.

00:19:28: Rolex's Submariner, introduced in nineteen fifty-three was designed as a professional diving instrument.

00:19:33: It became one of the most recognizable objects in the world.

00:19:37: worn by James Bond associated with success and adventure copied and counterfeited at an industrial scale The Submarina is now a cultural object As much as the horological one.

00:19:48: When someone wears a submarine they are wearing a set up associations.

00:19:56: The Omega Speedmaster chosen by NASA as its official watch for the Apollo missions after rigorous testing in nineteen sixty-five went to the moon.

00:20:06: This speed master professional is still sold today, essentially unchanged from most respects that astronauts wore on the lunar surface.

00:20:14: when you put one on your wearing something that has been in it's identical form into another world.

00:20:18: this not nothing.

00:20:20: And then there is the smartwatch, Apple Watch launched in twenty fifteen The Samsung Galaxy watch.

00:20:25: The Garmin series beloved by runners and hikers.

00:20:27: The Fitbit & its descendants.

00:20:29: These are computers on their wrist capable of measuring heart rate blood oxygen sleep quality activity levels receiving notifications playing music making payments.

00:20:40: they do things no pocket watch or mechanical wristwatch ever dreamed off!

00:20:45: Yet here's what I find most interesting.

00:20:48: they have not replaced the Mechanical Watch.

00:20:51: They exist alongside it, different people choose different things and many people chose both wearing a fitness tracker during the day And a mechanical watch for evenings or special occasions.

00:21:03: The functions separated from each other.

00:21:05: Smartwatch is for health monitoring and connectivity.

00:21:08: Mechanical watches are for something else entirely.

00:21:10: What that's something else?

00:21:12: That's the question.

00:21:13: The watch over its history has meant different things.

00:21:16: It has meant precision, the navigational instrument ,the military tool... ...the thing that made coordinated action possible.

00:21:23: .It has meant status.

00:21:25: !The pocket watch on it's chain.. ..the luxury swiss brand.... ....the signal of arrival and success!

00:21:31: It is meant practicality- the trendwatch,... ...the field watch..... ...the carcassio that simply tells the time reliably for years.

00:21:38: It means connection- the watch passed from father to child The timepiece worn on a significant occasion, the object that holds a memory of someone no longer here.

00:21:47: And now in the twenty twenties I think it means something new as well or something old seemed freshly.

00:21:53: We live in a world of infinite digital destruction.

00:21:57: Every glance at our phone is an invitation to go somewhere else A notification ,a headline social feed and endless queue of things demanding attention.

00:22:06: Checking the time on a phone is never just checking the time.

00:22:09: It's entering space that will try to hold you.

00:22:12: Checking your watch is just checking it.

00:22:15: A glance, gesture or piece of information received in less than one second and then back where you are.

00:22:22: The watch asks nothing about you!

00:22:24: It does not notify, it doesn't scroll... ...it has no opinions regarding what should be looked at next.

00:22:30: It simply tells me where I am today.

00:22:32: There is growing community for people Particularly among those who grew up with smartphones, who have known no other way.

00:22:40: Who wear watches specifically for this reason to have one device on their person that does exactly One thing and does it without asking For anything in return.

00:22:49: the watch is a boundary.

00:22:50: The watch as small actor of reclamation.

00:22:52: the women In the workshops I've lost sure they phone bending over tiny movements And winter light did not know They were making objects That would one day carry This meaning The officers and the trenches, strapping their pocket watches to their wrists in the dark before an advance were not thinking about digital detox.

00:23:08: The Radium Girls painting luminous dials in New Jersey could have never imagined a world where this thing they are making would be worn by astronauts on the moon!

00:23:17: But here we're with these objects on our wrist – this thing that started as jewelry became a necessity of war, was built by uncelebrated hands in mountain valleys.

00:23:26: Was nearly destroyed by crystal the size grain rice and survived to become both luxury and philosophy.

00:23:34: And sometimes just the thing you glance at know have enough time.

00:23:39: Every watch carries that whole story all over it In movement ,in case The way the hands move.

00:23:45: It is when think about it A very good way To carry Time.

00:23:49: So the next time you check your watch or notice someone else checked theirs, just hold that image for a second.

00:23:55: An officer in a trench in nineteen sixteenths trapping his watch to his wrist and dark.

00:23:59: A woman in the Jura mountains bending over tiny movement with fine pair of tweezers making something precise & small & beautiful in winter light.

00:24:08: an astronaut on the surface of moon glancing at speedmaster.

00:24:12: And YOU wherever you are With Time On Your Wrist.

00:24:16: The same idea the same human need, this same small revolution of carrying the hour with you rather than waiting for it to be announced.

00:24:24: Time is ordinary – The watch is ordinary and both of them when you look closely are extraordinary.

00:24:30: History isn't only in museums.

00:24:32: sometimes its in a quiet tick on your wrist marking every second that you're alive.

00:24:39: If This Is The Kind Of Episode You Want More Of Slow, detailed a bit like thinking out loud about something you've never thought of before.

00:24:46: The Hidden Life Of Things is on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and wherever you listen!

00:24:51: Do follow along?

00:24:52: I love knowing that there are so many people out there listening And if theres someone in your life who wears watch or has always worn one which we have always associated with the particular.

00:25:01: watch this one for them.

00:25:04: Here's your clue next time.

00:25:07: It saved more lives in the twentieth century than almost any other discovery of human history.

00:25:12: A scientist found it by accident, and at Petra Dish he was about to throw away.

00:25:16: but here is a thing most people don't know – The things that he found on that dish had been known for centuries before he ever walked into that lab honey garlic mouldy bread.

00:25:26: The story of how we learn to fight infection is not just a story about laboratories, it's the stories about kitchens and grandmothers.

00:25:34: About the gap between knowing something works... ...and knowing why it works!

00:25:39: Stay curious.

00:25:40: I'm Alexandra And i'll talk next week.