Automatic Watches

Here we have two types: mechanical and automatic watches. The mechanical watch has a spring that needs to be wound up by hand at regular intervals, usually every day. However, the automatic watch uses the movement of the wearer’s body to wind up the spring.

There is the possibility that with mechanical watches, you can overwind the mechanism and break the watch. The automatic watch, however, never overwinds the mechanism. On the other hand, a mechanical watch is found to be more accurate than an automatic watch.

One disadvantage of automatic and mechanical watches is the day and date function. The watch is automatically set to move over to the 1st of the month when a month has 31 days.

When you have 30 days or 28 days in the month, then the watch needs to be adjusted manually to compensate. The first automatic watch was designed by Abraham-Louis Perrelet in 1777 and was in the form of a pocket watch.

This watch required about 15 minutes of walking, in order to fully wind the watch up. In early 1778, Hubert Sarton designed an automatic wristwatch, which only needed the movement of the hand or arm to continually keep the watch fully wound up. The movement this early watch had is very similar to that of modern watches today.