Pocket watch

This article is about the portable timepiece. For the Dave Grohl album, see Pocketwatch (album).

A gold pocket watch with hunter case and watch chain

A pocket watch (or pocketwatch) usually is a strapless personal timepiece that is carried in a pocket. The display is traditionally analog. Pocket watches generally have a chain to be secured to a waistcoat, lapel, or belt loop (the chain or ornaments on it being known as fobs), as well as a hinged cover to protect the face of the watch; these are often called "fob watches". Such covers are not always present. Also common are fasteners designed to be put through a buttonhole and worn in a jacket or waistcoat, this sort being frequently associated with and named after train conductors.

An early reference to the pocket watch is in a letter in November 1462 from the Italian clockmaker Bartholomew Manfredi to the Marchese di Manta, where he offers him a 'pocket clock' better than that belonging to the Duke of Modena. By the end of the 15th Century, spring-driven clocks appeared in Italy, and in Germany. Peter Henlein, a master locksmith of Nuremberg, was regularly manufacturing pocket watches by 1510. Thereafter, pocket watch manufacture spread throughout the rest of Europe as the 16th Century progressed.

Overview

Hospital pocket watch, featuring instructions in Latin for measuring a patient's pulse.

Omega Pocket Watch, Lepine style, 38.5 caliber

Pocket watches are commonly regarded as being one of two types: the open faced watch or the hunter cased watch (also called savonette from the French). The latter has a hinged front cover that protects the face and crystal of the watch. It can also serve as a light collector to illuminate the dial in relatively dim lighting conditions.

Since the separate dial that marks the passage of seconds is traditionally placed closest to the six o'clock position, this means usually the stem (or pendant) of an open faced pocket watch is set at its twelve o'clock position. The hunter's stem is placed most commonly at the three o'clock position. When read, the open faced is held with the stem straight up and the hunter is read by turning the watch 90° with the stem pointing to the right.

Modern manufacturers of pocket watches, especially those watches with a quartz movement, are not bound by tradition when regarding the orientation of movements and the cases they are inserted into (open-faced or hunter).

Sometimes, what appears to be a mechanism intended for use in a wristwatch is used as the mechanism for a pocket watch.

Early pocket watches

The watch was first created in the 16th century when the spring driven clock was invented. These watches were at first quite big and boxy and were worn around the neck. It was not for another century that it became common to wear a watch in a pocket.

Use in railroading in the United States

See main article: Railroad chronometers

The rise of railroading during the last half of the 19th century led to the widespread use of pocket watches. Because of the likelihood of train wrecks and other accidents if all railroad workers did not accurately know the current time, pocket watches became required equipment for all railroad workers.

The first steps toward codified standards for railroad-grade watches were taken in 1887 when the American Railway Association held a meeting to define basic standards for watches. However, it took a disaster to bring about widespread acceptance of stringent standards. A famous train wreck on the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway in Kipton, Ohio on April 19, 1891 occurred because one of the engineers' watches had stopped for 4 minutes. The railroad officials commissioned Webb C. Ball as their Chief Time Inspector, in order to establish precision standards and a reliable timepiece inspection system for Railroad chronometers. This led to the adoption in 1893 of stringent standards for pocket watches used in railroading. These railroad-grade pocket watches, as they became colloquially known, had to meet the General Railroad Timepiece Standards adopted in 1893 by almost all railroads. These standards read, in part:

"...open faced, size 16 or 18, have a minimum of 17 jewels, adjusted to at least five positions, keep time accurately to within 30 seconds a week, adjusted to temps of 34 to 100 °F. have a double roller, steel escape wheel, lever set, regulator, winding stem at 12 o'clock, and have bold black Arabic numerals on a white dial, with black hands."

Railroad employees to this day are required to keep their watches on time, and are subject to spot checks by their superiors at any time. Failure to keep their watches on time can lead to disciplinary action, due to the gravely serious safety issues involved.

Additional requirements were adopted in later years in response to additional needs; for example, the adoption of the diesel-electric locomotive led to new standards from the 1940s on specifying that timekeeping accuracy could not be affected by electromagnetic fields.

Decline in popularity

A pocket watch with an attached compass.

Pocket watches are not common in modern times, having been superseded by wristwatches. Up until about the turn of the 20th century, though, the pocket watch was predominant and the wristwatch was considered feminine and unmanly. In men's fashions, pocket watches began to be superseded by wristwatches around the time of World War I, when officers in the field began to appreciate that a watch worn on the wrist was more easily accessed than one kept in a pocket. However, pocket watches continued to be widely used in railroading even as their popularity declined elsewhere.

For a few years in the late 1970s and 1980s three-piece suits for men returned to fashion, and this led to small resurgence in pocketwatches, as some men actually began using the vest pocket for its original purpose. Since then, a few watch companies make pocketwatches, and they have their firm adherents. However, in the U.S.A. for most men, most of the time, a pocket watch must be carried in a hip pocket, and the more recent advent of mobile phones and other gadgets that must be worn on the waist has made the prospect of carrying an additional item in that area less appealing, especially since all cell phones and similar devices tell the time. Yet in their time-telling capacity such devices essentially function as pocketwatches, albeit in novel form.

In the United States, a gift of a gold-cased pocket watch is traditionally awarded to an employee upon his or her retirement. In that capacity, a "gold watch" has become a cultural symbol alluding to retirement, obsolescence, and old age.

Pocket watches in fiction

• A pocket watch, and a chain for it, play a crucial role in the classic O. Henry short story "The Gift of the Magi."

• Frequently, pocket watches in fiction are used to indicate time ticking away, or to disguise far more advanced machinery. Many of these function in a time travel context, sometimes as a time machine (rather than a machine that measures time):

1. In the TV series Doctor Who, the Doctor has been seen with a pocket watch. In the episode Silver Nemesis his pocket watch (which contains electronic components) has an alarm indicating a planetary disaster; however, the Doctor travels in time using a TARDIS. In the latest series, the Doctor used a pocket watch to hide his Time Lord self when he turned himself into a human to escape a group of aliens known as the Family of Blood ("Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood"). One of his enemies from the old series, the Master, also apparently used a similar watch, leading into his re-emergence to the show ("Utopia").
2. In the American Sci-Fi TV series Voyagers!, the time travel device known as an Omni looks like a pocket watch to disguise it.

• In the anime series Fullmetal Alchemist, certified state alchemists are given a pocket watch with a military symbol on it. Real-life equivalents of this (modeled after the watch worn by the character Edward Elric with the inscription "Don't Forget, 3. Oct. 10" engraved on the inside of the cover) are available from various retailers (some of these have the date as "3 Oct. 11" instead, due to being modeled after the manga).

• In Lewis Carroll's novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Alice follows the White Rabbit after seeing it take a pocket watch out of its waistcoat-pocket.

• In Robert Bloch's short story "That Hell-Bound Train", a pocketwatch is an important symbol and plot point

• In most fiction involving hypnosis, a trance is induced by having the victim follow a pocket watch swinging back and forth in front of their eyes. Sometimes a wristwatch is substituted, which the "hypnotist" has to "swing" by swivelling the wrist; this is presumably done for ironic or humorous effect.

• In the Japanese tokusatsu program Kamen Rider Den-O, a pocket watch plays an important role in the story. It is engraved with the words "The past should give us hope."

• In Gankutsuou, the retro-futuristic anime adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo, Albert de Morcef is given a pocket watch by the Count which is inscribed with the saying "Death is certain, its hour uncertain" in Latin.

• In the Clint Eastwood film, "A few more dollars" the villain, "El Indio", played by Gian Maria Volonté, used the chimes in a pocketwatch he had stolen from one of his victims, in duels. He would play the musical chimes in the watch, and kill his opponent when the music stopped, until the very end when one of his opponents, the brother of the victim he stole the watch from, recognized the music. The song is in the key of D-minor, but the sixth degree of the musical scale is noticably absent, rendering it ambiguous as to natural minor versus Dorian mode. The watch is a "hunter-style" case, with the wind-up at the 3 o clock position, perhaps appropriate given that the victim's brother, who also had one, was a bounty hunter. (excerpts showing pocketwatch)

Watch Manufacturers

See separate article: List of watch manufacturers