Archive for February, 2010

Like most industries, the watch industry has a language all to itself and in some case within the industry you are judged by your knowledge as those “in the know” toss around tems to see how befuddled you may become.  We are here to help you out.  Starting next week we will begin, in addtion to our other on going catagories, a new catagory entitled ” Watch Definitions”.  As we go along we will try and touch on everything from the obvious like chronograph, crystal, and movements to the more complicated like pallets, plates & bridges and more.  Most importantly, if YOU have something that you would like to know, please feel free to ask and we will try to satiate your thirst for knowledge while geeting a leg up on our own.

As civilization became more sophisticated and less agrarian, the need to be able to split up the day into units became more necessary.  It was noticed early on that the shadow casted by a stick in the ground, a tree. or any tall straight structure such as a Obelisk could identify different points in the day.  These objects were the forerunners to the sundial know as gnomon.  Of course, a stick or object in the ground gave only a general idea what portion of the day it was … so with the need of more accuracy, the gnomon was added to a plate that was divided into equal parts to show different parts of the day and voila, thesundial is born.  As we know, this just created more “time keeping” problems.  What happens on cloudy days, at night, as the length of days change ?  Man was up for the challenge and we will consider the early solutions on the next entry of “The History of Time …”.

So where did time begin and what was the first way of keeping track of it ? Without getting into any political or religious discussions, how about we just agree that time began … well, at the beginning of time … in whatever way YOU view that to have occurred.

So what was the first way to keep track of time ? Sundials, water-clocks ? I think not. The interesting thing here is that every living organism has this time keeper and no, your favorite watch brand has not figured out how to sell to single cell organisms LOL. The first time keeper … the Circadian Clock (click on the picture for a better view), the “clock” inside you … the one that lets you know that it is time to eat, sleep, work or a myriad of other activities.  So if this innate quality works so well why did we become so obsessed with other methods of tracking time ?  Well, the answer is that your Circadian Clock doesn’t work so well all the time.  Its “accuracy” is subject to all the vicissitudes of your life.  So now that we have established the first “time piece”, as inaccurate as it may be,  we can talk about what came next in future posts