The Fuel Running Pocket Watches

The 17th century bore witness to the birth of portable watches. A century before that, clocks, which were rather too big to be anything near portable, were invented, paving the way for pocket watches to come out, widely accepted by the general public.

Workers could keep track of their work schedules, and organize their days quite efficiently with the aid of pocket watches. Bosses could keep tabs on performance ratings and production deadlines without the need for wall clocks. Travelling businessmen could now keep track of business transaction lengths, as well as define their travel time, and compensate for them on scheduled business meetings. The list of practical applications of pocket watches went on and on.

By the second half of the 19th century, a “real” need for pocket watches came. Train workers extensively used pocket watches, as during those times, train workers/railroad workers needed a synchronizing system to avoid deadly accidents and train crashes. Time couldn’t have been a better synchronizing system, and pocket watches came to aid train/railroad workers in this aspect. Pocket watches eventually became part of regulation uniform for railroad/train workers.

In 1887, railroad-grade pocket watches came out (through the efforts of the American Railway Association), calibrated and synchronized to effectively avoid train crashes, as well as maintain train schedules. These pocket watches eventually progressed along with the improvements in train-speed technology.

Common in those times, pocket watches came in two different kinds. The hunter cased and the open faced. Hunter cased pocket watches are basically fitted with a cover, and are designed similarly to that of a ladies’ compact. They are exactly kind we see in Victorian period movies where a man pulls out his pocket watch, flips it open, verifies the time, and puts it back again. As the name suggests, open faced pocket watches are those that don’t have a cover.

When the dawn of wristwatches came, pocket watches were slowly ousted out of the watch market. Smaller and more efficient timepieces were now available to the general public, and the extra load that was a pocket watch was something people would rather do away with.

Eventually, pocket watches became valuable tokens, when companies started to give out gold pocket watches to retiring workers. Their trendiness halted from this point on, as pocket watches have become a “status symbol”, earned thought years of hard work. Not exactly the look, a forward thinking twenty-something would want.

Today, pocket watches have become collectibles. There are still a number of pocket watches still in existence, and the act of acquiring one of them as a collectible could result to profits beyond what one would get from selling a “modern” wristwatch.

But one thing still remains, the uses that pocket watches catered to, are still in existence today. Though today’s “time tellers” come in various forms (from wristwatch, to mobile phone, to personal digital assistants), the spirit that sired the existence of pocket watches still lingers on.