Time Telling through the Ages

by Harry Chase Brearley

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 watch 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 watchmaking; 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 hand-copying. 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 watch, 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 watch 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 watch. 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 watch 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 watches 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 watch-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 watch, 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