SOURCE: In 1880 Constant Girard (
Girard-Perregaux) develops a concept of wristwatches, made for German naval officers and ordered by Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany. Two-thousand watches were produced, which represents the first important commercialization of wristwatches. Anyhow, for civilian the wristwatches were not popular among men.
At the beginning of the century wristwatches were mostly worn by women. In 1904, Brazilian aviator
Alberto Santos Dumont asked his friend
Louis Cartier to come up with an alternative that would allow him to keep both hands on the controls while timing his performances during flight. Cartier and his master watchmaker, Edmond Jaeger soon came up with the first prototype for a man's wristwatch called the Santos wristwatch. The Santos first went on sale in 1911, the date of Cartier's first production of wristwatches.
During the
First World War soldiers needed access to their watches while their hands were full. They were given wristwatches, called 'trench watches', which were made with pocketwatch movements, so they were large and bulky and had the crown at the 12 o'clock position like pocketwatches. After the war pocketwatches went out of fashion and by 1930 the ratio of wrist- to pocketwatches was 50 to 1. The first successful
self-winding system was invented by John Harwood in 1923.
