The first step towards watches as we understand them was the manufacture of pocket clocks (many of which show Dutch influence in design), some of the cases of which were very beautiful. The watches which followed in due course were at first without glasses, and for the better protection of the works and of the delicate engravings and ornamentation of the backs and dials loose cases of metal or shagreen were made. Some of them were highly ornamental, little studs of gold or silver being arranged in geometrical and floral patterns on the exteriors. Two very pretty examples of such cases are shown in Fig. [88].
Many of the watch backs were chased and perforated and beautifully enamelled; the dials were covered with painted miniatures, and gold watches were enriched with jewels. From Switzerland and Nuremberg come many choice examples; but there were clever watchmakers in England too, among them John Stevens, of Colchester, a sixteenth-century watchmaker noted for his pierced and engraved brass-gilt cases.
FIG. 87—SPECIMENS OF OLD WATCH KEYS.
FIG. 88.—TWO ANTIQUE WATCH CASES.
Classical figures and designs showing Dutch influence became popular late in the seventeenth century; then fashions changed, and the Court of the Emperors of France exercised an influence over art in this and other countries, and watch cases and other lesser objects were made more or less in harmony. At one time curiously shaped cases were the fashion; at another octagonal watches, such as were made in the seventeenth century by Edmund Bull, of Fleet Street, who is said to have made an elliptic silver watch engraved all over with minute scriptural subjects.
The collection of watches is a hobby indulged in by but few; there are, however, many single examples included in household curios, and not infrequently several handsomely engraved old watch cases are seen exhibited in the modern glass-topped curio tables so fashionable in twentieth-century drawing-rooms—now and then the interest in them being increased by the musical bells of the repeaters, many of which were made a century or more ago.