![]() ![]() There were exceptions, of course the Cartier Crash, introduced by Cartier London in 1967, is a wild thing, but wristwatches generally stayed restrained. World War II pretty much brought any notions of wildly exuberant anything, much less wristwatch design, to a screeching halt, and the 1950s and much of the 1960s saw the overwhelming dominance of the round, no-nonsense workmanlike watch return (even the most complicated wristwatches remained quite sober expressions of design). We got the Tonneau (also before the war) and then over a little more than a decade later, a wild variety of Tank watches, including the original Normale, the Tank Louis Cartier, the Cintrée, the Basculante, the Tank à Guichet, and others - wrist-wearable celebrations of the Roaring ’20s and the influence of the Art Deco movement. The Santos-Dumont preceded the outbreak of war in 1914 (and, having been made specifically at the request of an aviation pioneer, has the distinction of being the first purpose-made pilot’s watch) but after the Armistice, Louis Cartier really went to town. One of the biggest innovators in shaped watches was Cartier. The Birth of the Wristwatch and the Shape of Things to Come The first widely used wristwatches (worn in the trenches during World War I) were simply pocket watches with lugs soldered on, but as soon as the war ended, wristwatches that departed enthusiastically from the tyranny of round cases appeared like so many exotic mushrooms after a thunderstorm. Generally gents wore pocket watches in vest or waistcoat pockets which made roundness and smoothness even more urgent, since vests traditionally were cut close to the body.īut once the wristwatch started to become popular, at the beginning of the 20th century, the circle was broken almost immediately. There was a good reason for this pocket watches live in pockets and anything other than a smooth, rounded shape would be apt to snag as you took the watch out to look at the time. The shape of watches during the pocket watch era was extremely monotonous and there were hardly ever anything other than round pocket watches. This is not to say that there isn’t more than one way to skin a cat, however, and while most of the history of watch and clock making exhibits the irresistible attraction of circular dials, hands traveling in circles, and circular cases, there are innumerable and often very attractive alternatives to round-cased watches once you start getting off the beaten track. But, the symbolic importance of representing repeating cycles of time in circles cannot be overstated in the history of watch and clock design. There are practical reasons as well the gears on which every mechanical timekeeper depends are circular. It’s natural therefore, for the cycle of hours and minutes to be represented by a circle. How do salmon know when it’s time to spawn, or cicadas that 17 years have gone by?). Time, it has been intuited for as long as humans have measured it, occurs in repeating cycles and we have been tracking those cycles to increasingly finer resolution since, probably, the Paleolithic (and maybe much longer than that. There is something archetypally satisfying about a round wristwatch. ![]()
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