Officers began using wristwatches to coordinate the new style of attack: opening with a barrage of gunfire to stun and destabilize the enemy, followed immediately by an onrush of soldiers. One decried it as “the idiotic fashion of carrying one’s clock on the most restless part of the body.” Even watchmakers thought the wristwatch trend was silly and hoped it would die off. “They were very gender divided,” Thrift notes. But because women were the main wearers of wristwatches, men mostly avoided the trend. Time became information you acquired with a quick glance. The 18th and 19th centuries also saw some of the first formal wristwatches-with delicate, small watch faces, worn by women as a form of jewelry. So, much as today’s gym-goers put their iPods on an armband while they work out, sporting folks of the 19th century began to fashion “wristlets”-leather straps that would hold their pocket watch on their wrist while they rode on bicycles or on horseback. If you were trying to do something active-like drive a car or ride a horse-reaching into your pocket could distract you and cause disaster. “Punctuality gets marked as a morally elevated thing,” notes Robert Levine, author of A Geography of Time and a social psychologist at California State University, Fresno.īut pocket watches had one problem: They were impractical when you were on the go. The technology even created a new compliment: If you were ambitious and hardworking, people called you a “stemwinder”-somebody who habitually wound his timepiece. A 1913 Hamilton watch ad explicitly described the device as a tool for moral improvement: “The Hamilton leads its owner to form desirable habits of promptness and precision.” Soon, the watch was a straightforward metaphor for having attained the middle class: Horatio Alger novels often showed the plucky protagonist had “arrived” when he got a watch. history at Southern Methodist University who wrote Marking Modern Times, a history of American timekeeping. “You were a modern person, a timekeeping person, a regular person,” says Alexis McCrossen, a professor of U.S. Every time you pulled out your watch, conspicuously and in public, you signaled others that you were reliable. It was a cultural marker-a performance of punctuality. Having a watch wasn’t just about keeping to the clock, though. (“It is well known that we have no exact or certain standard of time in this borough,” complained a local paper.) In 1843, elections in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, were disputed when nobody could agree on what time the polls had closed-because the townspeople didn’t synchronize their clocks. (“You try conducting an affair without a sense of time,” Thrift jokes.)Īnd when precise time wasn’t available? Chaos ensued. Portable watches even made it easier for lovers to conduct illicit affairs, by arranging to meet at a preordained spot and time. “If you think about all the farms, those goods and crops around London, if they don’t get to the city at a certain time, they’re spoiled.” Meanwhile, pocket-watch-wielding conductors meant trains could begin to keep regular schedules scientists and astronomers could conduct more precise experiments. “Merchants desperately needed to time certain things,” says Nigel Thrift, co-author of Shaping the Day, a history of early timekeeping. When you could time your actions with those of a remote trading partner, new styles of just-in-time commerce could emerge. Affordable pocket watches weren’t common until the 19th century, but once they arrived, they quickly invaded the world of commerce. But timekeeping began to weave itself into day-to-day life in an entirely new way as clocks became more omnipresent and portable. To really understand how the wearable computer could change our lives, consider the impact of the original wearables-the pocket watch and the wristwatch.Ĭlocks began to transform everyday life as early as the medieval period, when church bells sounded the hours, letting villagers know the pace of the day. This isn’t the first time we’ve run through this debate, though. Apple is widely rumored to be putting out a smartwatch later this year.įor many, wearables seem like a final, crazed step in information overload: Tweets on your wrist! Supporters, however, claim that a smartwatch might actually be less annoying-because you can quickly glance at it. Already, over 400,000 people bought Pebble smartwatches last year, and Google’s head-mounted Glass computer was released to over 10,000 early adopters. We’ve long grown accustomed to carrying a computer in our pockets-but now tech firms are betting we’d rather have one on our wrist, showing us our messages, social-networking pings, maybe some Google searches. It’s a new high-tech debate, as “wearable” computers begin to go on sale.
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