Ladies, boxers, fashion fads, and cyclists: the birth of the wrist watch?

@LRFAntiqueWatches made a post about a very early ad for wristwatches, from July 1905. It was for a Gallet watch... and he has actually managed to track one of these watches down. How cool!

Anyways, this sparked my curiosity: What can we find in old newspapers and magazines about the birth of the wrist watch? I routinely work with different kinds of data, including very large datasets of digital or digitized text. So I figured I'd do a quick search. The Library of Congress maintains a large database of historical newspaper content (more than 20 million articles, I think?). For copyright reasons most of the data is pre-1930, but that's just fine for this purpose. If you're American and ever wonder where your tax dollars go, well, here's one place.

So let's see what we find. I wanted to use @LRFAntiqueWatches's find as a bookend, so I only looked at pre-1905 newspapers. If this is interesting, I might look at other periods at some point in the future.

Already in 1890, the J. Steinmetz Jewelry Company ran an ad in the Helena Independent (from Helena, Montana) advertising "wrist watches, $10 to $50". This was probably still quite a rare offering, and many readers would have been unfamiliar with the concept of strapping a watch to one's wrist. In April 1890, the Grenada Sentinel (from Grenada, Mississippi) introduced the wrist watch to its readers in greater length in an article on women's fashion trends:

"Sometimes they are attached with a thousand and one other trinkets to the chatelaine, sometimes set in the handle of umbrellas, or in the corner of the purse or card-case, and in a hand of leather or silver to be worn about the wrist. These watch bracelets were first invented as an accompaniment for the riding habit, when their obvious utility made amends for their extreme ugliness, but they seem to lie growing in popularity for shopping or street wear, and even come with a setting of silver and jewels with ornamental intent. One of the pretty, graceful dancers in the Gaiety company wears a very brilliant, sparkling affair, with a tiny watch in the center about her wrist, and jewelers display a variety of designs in silver, or silver set with jewels. The really swell and approved article, however, is a band of lizard skin about two and one-half inches in width and tapering toward the fit ends, buckled tightly about the left wrist, with an aperture for the insertion of an absurdly small watch."

But wrist watches didn't remain a women's item or an "extremely ugly" item for long. In 1899, the Salt Lake Herald from Utah ran a column under the pseudonym Beau Brummel (the real Beau Brummell, a key figure in early British men's fashion, had died in 1840) that observed a new-found interest among the officers who fought in the Spanish-American War:

"When the men from New York and Boston went to Cuba last summer a question arose especially among the officers as to the best method of carrying their watches, and a watch is a convenience no officer can afford to dispense with. A few sensible fellows adopted the custom common in the English army and among the hunting set of strapping the watch on the left wrist and the other when they saw how capitally the convenience worked sent promptly home for leather bracelet cases in which to put their timekeepers. The result has been that among men for the summer at least the watch is worn on the left wrist and this method has been adopted by the cyclists, yachtsmen, golfers, riders, etc, and complete is their satisfaction at the discovery that there are more ways of wearing a chronometer than in the waistcoat pocket."

Wrist watches were already in use among British officers and the sporting upper-class (the earliest sports watches, perhaps?) and offered some added convenience if your days were spent scampering through the fields and across golf courses and boats. The "men from New York and Boston" now discovered that they could be functional -- and perhaps stylish as well.

Already in 1896, the Evening Star in Washington, DC had run an ad that capitalized on this newfound fascination with wrist watches among some Americans. It promoted leather watch bracelets by declaring, "These are to hold your chatelain watch, and is the latest fad for women cyclists, as they can carry their watch on their wrist. Worth $1.50. Our price: .25"

But the wrist watch was often still seen as a women's item. (Let's give some credit here to the frequent and frequently unacknowledged role of women as pioneers in so many aspects of life!). In 1904, the boxer Tom Sharkey thus caused some consternation among his friends when he spotted a woman with a wrist watch in a railroad car and declared that he ought to have one, too. From the Deseret Evening News in Utah in 1904:

"Tom Sharkey always did set the fashion among the fighters and in a few weeks he will spring the latest on his brothers of the ring. [...] "Just as soon as I get back to New York I am going to Tiffany's and get measured for a wrist clock," declared Tom. "If you wear it," said [his friend], "I'll not allow you to enter my place at Sheepshead." "But it's the style," said Tom, "and I'm goin' to have a wrist clock."

The tide was evidently turning. The Rising Sun from Missouri thus noted in May 1905 that "There is no prettier nor safer method for carrying a watch than when it is securely set into a bracelet, which is usually made of bars of gold or silver, interlaced diagonally, as are the iron bars of a street-car gate. These bars can be opened wide or close tightly so as to fit snugly about any wrist. Another way for carrying a watch is to have it set in a leather bracelet which buckles around the wrist."

Gradually the wrist watch became an item considered fit for men and women, and an innovation that offered greater convenience as well as added style.

There are some odd episodes in this early history. In 1893, a self-proclaimed doctor from Pittsburgh named Mrs. Schwartz made headlines in the local paper for inventing a "diagnosing watch" that could allegedly be used to diagnose diseases simply by placing it on the wrist: "The mechanism of the watch is so delicately adjusted that, placed on the wrist, it is affected by each one of these veins, disturbance in any one of the veins, if the watch is placed on the wrist, is pointed out by the figures on the watch. Such disturbance indicates some disease according to the vein affected, the disease being thus identified, it is treated with herbs and lotions or the old woman's manufacture."

I'll leave you to decide if this meets modern standards of good medical practice.

There were also some odd trends that split the difference between a true pocket watch and a true wrist watch but would remain fashion fads and never catch on. According a newspaper from Massachusetts (in 1899), some women had little pockets sewn into their gowns "between the elbow and the wrist on the inside seam" to carry a small watch. Maybe that trend has disappeared for good reason?

(I really enjoy these dives into horological history or into the history of specific watches that @Deeperblue sometimes curates for her newsletter. A post about watch store history by @Cantaloop comes to mind, or the many insightful posts by @Uhrologe. Thanks to everyone who takes the time to put them together. So I guess this is also my way of paying my dues by giving back.)