Watches -- the Basics

A watch is a small portable clock that displays the time and sometimes the day, date, month and year. In modern times they are usually wrist-watches, worn on the wrist with a watch-strap (made of e.g. leather [often synthetic], metal, or nylon), although before the 20th century and cheap miniaturization, most were pocket watches, which had covers and were carried separately, often in a pocket, and hooked to a watch chain.

Current watches are often digital watches, using a piezoelectric crystal, usually quartz, as an oscillator (see quartz clock).

Watches may be collectible; they are often made of precious metals, and can be considered an article of jewelry.

Cheaper electronics permitted the popularization of the digital watch (an electronic watch with a numerical, rather than analog, display) in the second half of the 20th century. They were seen as the great new thing. Douglas Adams, in the introduction of his novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, would say that humans were 'so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea'.

The first digital watch, a Pulsar prototype in 1970, was developed jointly by Hamilton Watch Company and Electro-Data. A retail version of the Pulsar was put on sale in 1972. It had a red light-emitting diode (LED) display. Another early digital watch innovator, Roger Riehl's Synchronar Mark 1, provided an LED display and used solar cells to power the internal nicad batteries[6]. Watches with LED displays were popular for the next few years, but soon the LED displays were superseded by liquid crystal displays (LCDs), which used less battery power. The first LCD watch with a six-digit LCD was the 1973 Seiko 06LC, although various forms of early LCD watches with a four-digit display were marketed as early as 1972 including the 1972 Gruen Teletime LCD Watch.

In addition to the function of a timepiece, digital watches can have additional functions like a chronograph, calculator, video game, etc.

Digital watches have not replaced analog watches, despite their greater reliability and lower cost. In fact, because digital watches are so cheap, analog watches are often worn as status symbols. For others, analog watches are just easier to read.

Battery-less watches are powered by the movement of the wearer's arm. That movement causes a weight to move back and forth, which sets a micro-generator spinning, which produces electrical energy. The electricity is stored in a capacitor (analogous to a battery in a battery-powered watch).

From this point on, the battery-less watch functions as a normal quartz watch does: the electricity is transmitted to an integrated circuit, which keeps the quartz crystal oscillating at 32,768 hertz. The integrated circuit sends impulses at one-second intervals to the stepping motor, which powers the gear train, which moves the watch's hands.(Wikipedia)

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