It’s amazing but the creation of the portable mechanical watch is hard to trace exactly. It is generally assumed that it was Peter Henlein who first created portable clocks due to the popular demand for smaller clocks in the home in the late 15th century.

These clocks replaced the cumbersome church bell system with a spring-based system, providing power via a slowly unwinding spring. These portable clocks were quite inaccurate and did not feature minute or second hands until the 17th century. At that time, new developments by Tycho Brahe would allow for greater accuracy.

These early portable watches had a problem with the mainspring winding, and a component called a fuse was added to solve this problem. The fuse is a cone that serves to solve the problem created by winding the mainspring: that is, this voltage changes as it decreases. The fuse seeks to stabilize this fluctuating voltage, but eventually became obsolete due to the bulk it added to clocks.

Progress in the manufacture of materials and increasingly perfected watchmaking techniques gradually created increasingly accurate watches, with precision pendulums and second-indicating hands. In the 20th century, electric, atomic and quartz clocks emerged, which gave manufacturers the means to measure time with extreme accuracy. The smaller and smaller circuits created by electronics made it possible to produce new types of portable watches in the last decades of the century. The traditional circular dial, with hands, was replaced by small digital panels, in which the measurement of time is presented in the form of luminous or dark numbers. Thanks to a tiny computer chip, electronic watches can have sophisticated alarm clock, calculator and agenda systems; others have a calendar and stopwatch.

We always need to count the time. The only thing that has changed is the way we strive to tell it.