A German clock,
Still a-repairing, ever out of frame,
And never going aright, being a watch—
A century after Shakespeare's day, Doctor Johnson remarked that a dictionary was like a watch: "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.
The "Nuremburg Egg," the First Real Watch
"Out of a little iron, Peter Henlein constructs clocks which ... can be carried in the pocket."—so wrote Johannes Coeleus, in 1511.