Time Telling through the Ages

by Harry Chase Brearley

In all this journey, covering thousands of years, one thing has made itself clear to us—the story of timepieces is not a mere mechanical story; it is a human story. Men did not put together certain pieces of wood or metal in order merely to make mechanism, but to meet a vital need. One might almost say that the story of the watch is in the watch itself. The works run and the hands move because of the mainspring, which by pressing steadily forces them into motion. In very much the same way, the busy brains of the inventors and the busy hands of the workmen have been kept active because advancing civilization has been like a great mainspring, always pressing upon larger affairs and greater numbers of people, always needing to fit its engagements more and more closely together, and always calling for better and better means for telling time. Thus, if the watch in the days of Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth was still an inaccurate timepiece, its improvement was a foregone conclusion. Brains and hands were still active; civilization was still pressing.

It is said that a hog helped in the next development; he helped quite unconsciously by furnishing a bristle. In order to understand this, we must remember Galileo's swinging lamp and the pendulum that the Englishman, Hooke, and the Hollander, Huyghens, applied in the making of clocks. It will be recalled that a pendulum swings in arcs of different lengths in exactly the same time and that this property is called isochronism. Both Hooke and Huyghens could see that the application of isochronism would be quite as valuable in a watch as in a clock, but they realized that this could not be accomplished by means of the pendulum. Therefore, each began to experiment, and each seems to have hit upon the same idea as a substitute for the pendulum in about the year 1665.

This is where the hog's bristle came into use. One end was made fast while the other was bent back and forth by the balance, as it swung to and fro. Being short and stiff, it acted as a spring; in fact, its motion was something like the swing of a small pendulum, and some people incorrectly claim that the name of hair-spring first came from this use of a hair. Of course, a very fine steel was soon substituted for the bristle. Next, it was realized that there would be an advantage if a much longer spring were used, and obviously the only way in which this could be done was by making it in the form of a coil, and so we have the delicate, coiled hair-spring, as it is found in our own watches to-day.

The principle of the hair-spring is not unlike that of the pendulum: the farther the pendulum is swung out from the lowest point of its arc, the greater is the force that gets it back; and the farther a spring is bent from its position of rest, the greater is the force exerted to get it back. With both of these devices it is possible to obtain regular beats and steady motion.

It is hard to realize that nearly a hundred years must have passed by before the hair-spring came into common use. To-day any new device is described in catalogs, written up in the papers, manufactured in quantities and is quickly carried by travelers into every country, but in those days everything was still made by hand, piece by piece, and there was comparatively little travel that would admit of its distribution. Ideas made their way very slowly. In fact, Julien Le Roy rediscovered the principle of isochronism and announced it with a good deal of pride, quite ignorant of the fact that Hooke and Huyghens explained it nearly a century before. And so the hair-spring was slowly adopted by English watchmakers with a number of minor improvements.

Other inventors, of whom presently we shall hear more, worked out better methods of escapement, and the watch movement developed slowly toward its present form. It became possible to tell time more accurately and to make arrangements and plans more closely as the watch became a better time-keeper. The pace of life was speeding up, and people were realizing the value of minutes—even of seconds. Therefore the minute- and second-hands were added to the hour-hand that so long had moved alone around the watch-dial. And in 1704, Nicholas Facio, a Swiss doing business in London, introduced jeweled bearings into the mechanism.

The importance of jewels is often misunderstood even at the present day. Many people do not know why jewels are used in a watch, assuming that they are intended for ornament or in some way to increase the value. But most of the jewels in a watch-movement are placed out of sight; and, although they often consist of real rubies or sapphires, they are so tiny and their intrinsic value so small that no watch requires more than one dollar's worth of jewels. They are strictly utilitarian in their purpose. A pivot or bearing, running in a hole drilled in a jewel, creates almost no friction and requires so little oil that a single drop as big as a pinhead is enough for an entire watch. Because jewels are so hard and smooth, a watch with jeweled bearings runs better and wears less and requires less power to drive it, than one in which they are lacking.

During all the time recounted, the great mainspring of civilization had been pressing, ever pressing. Nothing could be considered "good enough" if a way could be found to improve it.

At last an improvement came out of the sea. Travel had been reaching out in every direction; ships were fitted out by scores to take goods from England or the continent of Europe to lands across the seas and to bring back the products of these countries.