From pocket to wrist: how the wristwatch was born

The wristlet was a joke

In the 1880s, a respectable European gentleman would no more strap a watch to his wrist than wear his cufflinks on his collar. The watch lived in the waistcoat pocket on a chain, and consulting it was a small deliberate ceremony — pause, reach, click, glance, return. A watch on the wrist was a trinket, a women's accessory: Patek Philippe had made what is often counted the first true wristwatch as early as 1868, a jewelled bracelet piece for the Hungarian Countess Koscowicz, and that association held for forty years. The trade called early men's examples "wristlets," and the diminutive carried its full freight of condescension — the form was famously dismissed in the period press as a passing fad no serious man would adopt. Men, one quip ran, would sooner wear a skirt than a wristwatch. That consensus collapsed in under two decades, and it was demolished not by fashion but by war.

Why did soldiers change everything?

Military use exposed the pocket watch's one unfixable flaw: it requires a free hand and a pause. Coordinating movement across broken terrain demands knowing the time continuously while keeping both hands occupied. British officers had begun strapping watches to their wrists in the colonial campaigns of the 1880s — leather "wristlet" carriers holding small pocket watches appear in the Burma campaign era, and Garstin of London patented such a carrier in 1893. By the Boer War (1899–1902), firms like Mappin & Webb were advertising purpose-made "campaign watches," and officers' accounts treat wrist-wear as ordinary field practice.

The First World War made it universal. Infantry tactics of 1916–1918 were built on timing: the creeping barrage, in which artillery fire advanced on a strict schedule with infantry following yards behind, made the synchronised watch literally a survival tool — officers' watches were coordinated before an attack as a standard part of orders. The Swiss industry shifted substantial production to purpose-built wristwatch calibres; Omega and Longines supplied forces on both sides; and the "trench watch" — a small movement in a robust case with wire lugs, luminous radium dial, and often a shrapnel guard hinged over the crystal — became the bridge form between pocket and wrist, treated in detail in its own article in this chapter. The men who came home in 1918 came home with the habit formed and with the social licence of military service to keep it. By 1930, by contemporary trade estimates, wristwatches outsold pocket watches by roughly fifty to one. The pocket watch did not fade; it collapsed.

The interwar years: from utility to culture

After 1918, the wristwatch moved quickly through civilian life, and the transition completed from both directions at once: returning soldiers had normalised wrist-wear for men, while women had worn wristwatches as fashionable objects all along. Through the 1920s and 1930s the form became a design object in its own right. Art Deco geometry arrived on dials and cases; complications that had lived only in pocket watches were miniaturised for the wrist; precious metals dressed the form for evening. Two engineering landmarks defined the decade's other direction. The Rolex Oyster of 1926 — the first commercially successful waterproof case, its bezel, caseback, and crown all screwed down against gaskets — was demonstrated with perfect publicity instinct when Mercedes Gleitze wore one through a ten-hour Channel swim attempt in October 1927 and it emerged running; Hans Wilsdorf took the front page of the Daily Mail to say so. And the Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso of 1931 answered a complaint from British polo players in India — smashed crystals — with a case that slides and flips to present solid metal to the world, a piece of pure functional engineering that became one of the most enduring designs in watch history. The pattern was set early: the best wristwatch designs come from specific problems, not abstract styling.

The tool-watch era

From the 1950s through the early 1970s, the wristwatch found demanding professional clients — divers, pilots, racing drivers, explorers — whose requirements drove the designs collectors now treat as canonical. In 1953 alone, Blancpain's Fifty Fathoms was developed with and issued to French Navy combat swimmers, and Rolex launched the Submariner with its rotating timing bezel and 100-metre rating. Pan American World Airways' need to show crews two time zones produced the Rolex GMT-Master in 1955. NASA flight-qualified the Omega Speedmaster for manned spaceflight in 1965 after brutal comparative testing, and it went to the Moon on Buzz Aldrin's wrist in 1969. Heuer put its chronographs on the wrists of working drivers, most famously through its 1969 sponsorship arrangement with Jo Siffert. These watches were not designed to be beautiful. They were designed to work, in environments that punished anything superfluous — and the discipline produced a particular visual honesty: every element solved a real problem, and nothing was present that did not. The individual references and the collecting categories they created are covered in the case studies; what matters here is the principle.

From tool to trophy

By the 1980s, the watches working divers and pilots had bought to do jobs were appearing on wrists at dinner tables. The transformation happened gradually, then suddenly. The Submariner had been on Sean Connery's wrist in Dr. No. The Speedmaster had been on the Moon. The GMT-Master was what airline captains actually wore. Each accumulated associations beyond its function, and to wear one was to wear the associations too. When these watches began appearing at auction — Antiquorum's Geneva sales through the 1980s and 1990s, then the great thematic and evening sales that have defined the market since — collectors recognised something the trade had not fully priced: examples with warm aged lume, softened case edges, and honest wear were records of real use, not just old products. The logic reached its public peak in October 2017, when Paul Newman's own Rolex Daytona sold at Phillips in New York for 17.75 million dollars, then the highest price ever paid for a wristwatch. A battlefield improvisation had become, within a century, the most culturally loaded object a man can wear on his body.

The wristwatch began as a battlefield improvisation and became, within a generation, the universal instrument of personal timekeeping — and then something else again: a cultural object whose value lies precisely in its connection to the era when it was a serious tool. The best wristwatch designs are the ones where every element follows from a real requirement. That is not a coincidence. It is the design principle the rest of this site keeps returning to.