History of the Advent of the pocket Watch

the earliest watches that exist are from the early fifteen hundreds...and came about with the invention of the mainspring. a form of portable power. the early mechanisms were made in iron which is most likely the reason not many early watches have survived. the earliest existing watch can be credited to Peter Henlein from Nuremburg, Germany...started off as a locksmith.

with watches its always been about trying to offset the laws of nature and gravity. springs lose their tension as they wind down so  mechanical forms of equalization were employed. the fusee and the stackfreed were the two common forms used in portable time pieces.

 diagram shows a fusee set up as used in most old pocket watches.

i will save the stackfreed for another time

from the advent of the portable time piece circa 1480 until 1670 little changed in the accuracy of these mechanical wonders...so all the energy went into decoration...fantastical engraving...beautiful paintings in enamel all done on a minature scale and still a functioning machine...incredible workmanship.

but wait i am getting ahead of myself...all these time pieces run using the  verge escapement its been around since at least the thirteen hundreds...whats an escapement?  well it is a regulator so the watch maintains some form of control over how it winds down.

in this diagram of the verge escapement the hairspring is included...but this system functioned for about 300 years without it. these are known as pre-hairspring timepieces. come 1675 that all changed when Christian Huygens after many years of research and development used a hairspring to make the beat of the watch more regular and less affected by gravity and motion. its still used today on modern timepieces.