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Whether because of a passion for engineering or indeed fashion, many of us have a real love for watches. The wristwatch hasn’t been around for very long, in fact until the 20th century most portable/ wearable timepieces were pocket watches.

The technology used within the wristwatch has developed in huge leaps over the last century, building on the proud tradition of timepiece manufacturing and technology that had developed over the previous few hundred years.

Industry
Wristwatches became available through the process of miniaturisation that was made possible through this period, taking the advanced technological designs and movements and combining them into wearable timepieces that have become artworks as well as instruments of precision engineering. The mass production methods that became possible within industry have also helped to fuel these developments for timepieces.

Environments
Watches today are used within a huge variety of contexts, mirroring the vast array of directions in which society has moved. From sports to high fashion, the wristwatch has become so much a part of our daily lives that it’s hard to imagine us coping without it.

Brands
A huge range of watch brands are now available, specialising in numerous different areas. High performance watches for use within sporting environments have progressed massively over the past years, with a wealth of technological advancements poured into their design. Within the world of fashion and design, the watch has enjoyed a similar amount of attention. Artists and designers have used the wristwatch to express their own unique visions, resulting in a vast range of visual and technical styles available to the consumer.

In terms of engineering, watch collectors are spoiled for choice, with timepieces that reflect developments made throughout the history of watch making. The enormous changes within technology as a whole in the past 100 years have naturally benefited watch making, in terms of both digital and analogue technologies.

Innovation
One of the most exciting developments within watch making has been the creation of automatic watches, which utilise the energy from the natural movements of the wearer, using this to power the winding mechanisms in the watch. This is typical of the kind of ingenuity and expertise that has been instrumental in so many technical advancements.

Manufacturers
The wider industrial changes within society over the past hundred or so years have also made a significant contribution to the watch-making world. In many cases, a watch brand may not actually manufacture the parts or movements used within the watches that they produce. This tendency for individual organisations to focus on one element in the creation of a watch has been a common one throughout watch making history. This has today led to an industry in which those individual parties involved in the field are able to focus on the area in which they specialise, while liasing with others in the field to create a unified whole.

Whether it’s design or engineering, the expertise used to produce a fine timepiece has a wide-ranging set of skills, knowledge, experience and passion at the root of it.