Whether you collect those new high precision watches or those from a past era, the fact is, over the years, this hobby has become a high turnover business. And in a lot of circles, collecting watches is regarded as a smart form of investment.
At the start of the last century, the first time pieces that were available for men and women were pocket clocks, and then what came next were those held by a pendant attached to the lining of jackets or corsets. The occurrence of war, industrialization, and the development of sport activities brought about new trends which extended not only to the way we dressed, but also how we accessorized using our time pieces.
It is known that a nanny was the one responsible in inventing the wrist watch at around the end of the 19th century, who fixed a clock around her wrist by using a silk band. The first watches to be made were in fact smaller models of pocket clocks that were fitted with a leather strap. Once this product hit the market, newer designs began to appear based around this same concept.
It was Louis Cartier who first made the kind of watches we see at fashion stores online today when he created a watch for a flying pioneer hero by the name of Santos Dumont. By 1911, this same type of watch was on general sale. That very same type of time piece became the first blueprint of what wrist watches look like to this day.
Soon after, the design of "wrist clocks" began to pull away from the classic round shape that had been en vogue up until that time. From the Cartier classic wrist watch, other designs started to emerge that were characterized by their shape. Movado is the perfect example of these new designs when it came out with the “Polyplan” shaped watch. Then came the famously and cryptically called "clock reference n. 1593" by Patek Philippe which was a rectangular shaped watch.
From 1913 onwards, more and more watches started to be developed in all shapes, sizes and styles. From the "gondola" watch of Patek Phillipe to Louis Cartier’s "Tank"; named thus because it was inspired by the shape of English armored cars of that time. These are watches which were very much sought-after. There were other numerous watch makers like Audemars Piguet, Vacheron Constantin who, along with Patek Philippe and Cartier, came out with many other designs which added other features to their time pieces like lunar phases, and a month and day indicator most of which are found in modern watches now.
Of course, we would never discuss time pieces without mentioning the most famous of them all: the Rolex. In the 1920s, Rolex debuted in the world of wrist watches through the release of its elegant Rolex Prince and its revolutionary "dual time" feature made famous for having the "seconds sector" larger than that of the minutes’. At the same time, Jaeger Le Coultre created an even more advanced piece called the "Reverse," a very innovative piece that it could be turn 180 degrees within its case, thus protecting the crystal and its dial. It became incredibly popular and was only prevented from achieving even greater success by the recession of the 1930s and the occurrence of World War II.
These early watches of the 1910s to 1930s defined all the kinds of watches that we all see and wear today. This short article has only scratched the surface of a very wide subject that includes many more watch manufacturers with diverse and revolutionary designs. However, makers like Rolex, Cartier, Jaeger Le Coultre are amongst the most valuable and collectible, and should you ever have the opportunity to own one or their time pieces then make sure you hang on to it—preferably attached to your wrist.