Self-Winding Wrist-Watch

Abstract

The idea of the self-winding watch can be traced back to the eighteenth century, if not earlier, when Abraham-Louis Perrelet, a Swiss, Abraham-Louis Bréguet, a Frenchman, and Louis Recordon, a Swiss settled in England, all produced pedometer pocket watches in which the mainspring was wound up by a small internal weight swinging with the movement of the wearer. These watches remained curiosities; they were easily damaged, difficult to repair, bulky and expensive. Later, in the nineteenth century, a number of patents were taken out on self-winding watches, but these were still of the pedometer type and embodied no radical innovation.