The Watch and Navigation

The Final Major Watch Improvements were Required for Navigation.

NOW, since we are at last well into the story of the watch, let us glance back over the road we have traveled. We have seen man first beginning to think of time by noting the positions of shadows or the motions of the stars. Next, we have seen him making his plans for days ahead by means of the changes in the moon, then by making such division in the flow of time as the month, the season, and the year. We have seen him growing out of his savage isolated life in caves and forests and forming tribes and settlements, and have seen him coming out of the darkness of those early ages into Mesopotamia, the Land Between the Rivers, where our first written history seems to begin.

Here, with great cities, temples, and a high degree of civilization and culture, we have found priests studying the stars and making sun-dials and clepsydrae in order to tell the time by shadows, sunbeams, or the dropping of water. We have taken a glimpse at the wonderful people of Greece and Rome, and have seen how, as they became more cultured, they found it necessary to have more accurate means of telling time. We have considered the advantages and disadvantages of the sand-glass, have found clumsy pieces of clock-work in church towers, getting their running power from weights, in order to strike the bells, and have stood with young Galileo in the Cathedral at Pisa, when a swinging lamp gave him the idea of the pendulum.

Lastly, we have seen the making of smaller clocks--that were made smaller and smaller until they could be carried as watches, in which springs were used instead of weights. Following this, it has been merely a question of improvement, as one inventor after another has hit upon some idea that would do away with this or that difficulty.

Thus we have come, in the time of Shakespeare, to a clever little contrivance that ticked beautifully but registered time rather badly; that took a long while to manufacture by hand, and cost so much that only the rich could afford to buy it, and that, in consequence, people were proud to own, but did not take seriously as a timepiece.

In all this journey, covering thousands of years, one thing has made itself clear to us--the story of timepieces is not a mere mechanical story; it is a human story. Men did not put together certain pieces of wood or metal in order merely to make mechanism, but to meet a vital need. One might almost say that the story of the watch is in the watch itself. The works run and the hands move because of the mainspring, which by pressing steadily forces them into motion. In very much the same way, the busy brains of the inventors and the busy hands of the workmen have been kept active because advancing civilization has been like a great mainspring, always pressing upon larger affairs and greater numbers of people, always needing to fit its engagements more and more closely together, and always calling for better and better means for telling time. Thus, if the watch in the days of Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth was still an inaccurate timepiece, its improvement was a foregone conclusion. Brains and hands were still active; civilization was still pressing.

It is said that a hog helped in the next development; he helped quite unconsciously by furnishing a bristle. In order to understand this, we must remember Galileo's swinging lamp and the pendulum that the Englishman, Hooke, and the Hollander, Huyghens, applied in the making of clocks. It will be recalled that a pendulum swings in arcs of different lengths in exactly the same time and that this property is called isochronism. Both Hooke and Huyghens could see that the application of isochronism would be quite as valuable in a watch as in a clock, but they realized that this could not be accomplished by means of the pendulum. Therefore, each began to experiment, and each seems to have hit upon the same idea as a substitute for the pendulum in about the year 1665.

This is where the hog's bristle came into use. One end was made fast while the other was bent back and forth by the balance, as it swung to and fro. Being short and stiff, it acted as a spring; in fact, its motion was something like the swing of a small pendulum, and some people incorrectly claim that the name of hair-spring first came from this use of a hair. Of course, a very fine steel was soon substituted for the bristle. Next, it was realized that there would be an advantage if a much longer spring were used, and obviously the only way in which this could be done was by making it in the form of a coil, and so we have the delicate, coiled hair-spring, as it is found in our own watches to-day.

The principle of the hair-spring is not unlike that of the pendulum: the farther the pendulum is swung out from the lowest point of its arc, the greater is the force that gets it back; and the farther a spring is bent from its position of rest, the greater is the force exerted to get it back. With both of these devices it is possible to obtain regular beats and steady motion.

It is hard to realize that nearly a hundred years must have passed by before the hair-spring came into common use. To-day any new device is described in catalogs, written up in the papers, manufactured in quantities and is quickly carried by travelers into every country, but in those days everything was still made by hand, piece by piece, and there was comparatively little travel that would admit of its distribution. Ideas made their way very slowly. In fact, Julien Le Roy rediscovered the principle of isochronism and announced it with a good deal of pride, quite ignorant of the fact that Hooke and Huyghens explained it nearly a century before. And so the hair-spring was slowly adopted by English watchmakers with a number of minor improvements.

Other inventors, of whom presently we shall hear more, worked out better methods of escapement, and the watch movement developed slowly toward its present form. It became possible to tell time more accurately and to make arrangements and plans more closely as the watch became a better time-keeper. The pace of life was speeding up, and people were realizing the value of minutes--even of seconds. Therefore the minute-and second-hands were added to the hour-hand that so long had moved alone around the watch-dial. And in 1704, Nicholas Facio, a Swiss doing business in London, introduced jeweled bearings into the mechanism.

The importance of jewels is often misunderstood even at the present day. Many people do not know why jewels are used in a watch, assuming that they are intended for ornament or in some way to increase the value. But most of the jewels in a watch-movement are placed out of sight; and, although they often consist of real rubies or sapphires, they are so tiny and their intrinsic value so small that no watch requires more than one dollar's worth of jewels. They are strictly utilitarian in their purpose. A pivot or bearing, running in a hole drilled in a jewel, creates almost no friction and requires so little oil that a single drop as big as a pinhead is enough for an entire watch. Because jewels are so hard and smooth, a watch with jeweled bearings runs better and wears less and requires less power to drive it, than one in which they are lacking.

During all the time recounted, the great mainspring of civilization had been pressing, ever pressing. Nothing could be considered "good enough" if a way could be found to improve it.

At last an improvement came out of the sea. Travel had been reaching out in every direction; ships were fitted out by scores to take goods from England or the continent of Europe to lands across the seas and to bring back the products of these countries.

The time had been, but a few generations earlier, when people had stood on the shores of the ocean and had wondered what might lie beyond their sight. That water stretched out to the "edge of the world" they felt sure, but what there happened to it they could not tell. Surely, however, it must be peopled with monsters and demons. It was foolhardy to venture too far from land. We can hardly realize what a piece of insane rashness it must have seemed to most people when Columbus sailed out boldly into this vast mystery, nor how the world was thrilled when he brought back word of strange lands and strange peoples he had found beyond the horizon.

But by the time now reached in our story the oceans had become highways of trade, and men were beginning to draw those strange, crude maps of the continents, which make us smile until we stop to think how maps might have looked had they been left for us to make. At all events, the problems involved in navigation were being much discussed in every land.

One of the greatest of these problems was to discover the whereabouts of the ship at any given time. When one is out of sight of land the sense of location necessarily becomes inoperative; one wave looks like another, and there are winds and currents which might carry a ship hundreds of miles out of its course unless there were some way of knowing its true position. At first, the stars, and later the compass gave help in giving direction but not in showing position. How might this be done? There was no possible way in which the element of telling time did not enter.

That sounds a bit strange until one stops to think of the rotation of the earth once in twenty-four hours. If one could travel around the earth, from east to west, at a uniform rate in exactly twenty-four hours, he would find clocks and watches indicating the exact minute he started at every step of his journey; and the sun would remain steadily at the same height above the horizon, if he always kept to one parallel of latitude. His rate of speed would have to be about eighteen miles a minute, if he chose to travel along the equator, or to state this same thing in another way, when it is noon in New York, it is 11 A.M. in Chicago, 10 A.M. in Denver and 9 A.M. in San Francisco; it is also 1 P.M. several hundred miles out into the Atlantic; 2 P.M. still farther out; 5 P.M. in London; and so on. In other words, it is some one of all the moments of the twenty-four-hour day at the same time, but the time that indicates each of these moments is different at different points. Therefore, if you could find out the time at any point, and could compare it with the time at the place you had left, you would know just how far east or west you had come, but not how far north or south.

Ascertaining the time was not difficult; at noon it would be shown by the sun. Nor was it difficult to compare the time provided one had an accurate timepiece, but a watch that ran either fast or slow might mislead one by hundreds of miles. You can see how important it was that navigators have some means of exactly measuring time. This was one of the points at which the great mainspring of civilization pressed hardest upon the brains of inventors and the hands of workmen.

So, from the sixteenth century onward, the leading governments of Europe offered large rewards for a chronometer sufficiently accurate to determine longitude at sea. In England, Parliament offered twenty thousand pounds, or one hundred thousand dollars, for a time-keeper which, throughout a voyage to the West Indies, would give the longitude within thirty miles. This meant that it must keep time within a minute a month, or two seconds a day. Both Huyghens and Hooke somewhat naively attempted to make a pendulum clock keep time at sea; but imagine the action of a pendulum while a ship was rolling and tossing!

The problem was really one for the watchmaker, since a clock is made for keeping time while standing in one position and a watch for keeping time while being moved about. John Harrison, the inventor of the famous grid-iron pendulum, finally won the munificent prize. In 1762, after several trials and failures, he succeeded in producing a timepiece which varied, under test, only a minute and four seconds during a voyage of some five months. This was excellent timekeeping--far within half a second a day; it made it possible for a captain at sea to determine his position within eighteen miles. Harrison's mechanism was too complicated for description in these pages. Indeed, it was so difficult of comprehension that, before paying him his reward, the English government asked Harrison to write a book of explanation in order that his inventions might be copied by other makers. He did so and finally received the money. Harrison's ideas have now been greatly simplified, but, in general, his plan is used in the making of marine chronometers to this day; thus, in a sense, it is due to Harrison's brain that our great ships are able to cross the ocean on almost schedule time.

Both the first success of the chronometer and the later efforts toward improving it had a great influence upon the next few generations of watchmakers; the final improvements were made in the days of the American Revolution. It was at this latter period that a man named Thomas Mudge worked out the kind of escapement that is still used in our watches. A little later, the Swiss-Parisian, Abraham Louis Breguet, improved the hair-spring by bending its outer coil across the others to their center and fastening it at that point in order that the spiral of the spring should expand equally in all directions from the center.

The last development of importance consisted in doing away with the fusee. The faults of this device had been the need of a thick watch to give it room, and the danger that a broken mainspring might destroy other parts of the movement in its recoil. French and Swiss watchmakers reduced the friction until it needed very little power to run the mechanism, and then were able to employ a mainspring which was not stiff enough to require a fusee. American makers adopted this idea, but the British clung to the fusee and the stiff spring; it has cost them much of their prestige as watchmakers and much of their trade.

Thus, the mechanism of both clocks and watches was practically in its present state by the year 1800. The "grandfather's clock" of that date may look old-fashioned, but it tells time a modern way, and the mechanical ideas in George Washington's watch were not so very different from those which we find in our own. There have been many small improvements since, but the great inventions had all been made.

It is interesting to remember that most of these inventions are due to the English artisans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although in delicate workmanship and beautiful decoration, they were equaled and perhaps excelled by the Swiss and by the French. The work of producing a satisfactory timekeeping machine, begun by priests and by astronomers, and carried forward by the demands of the navigator and the patient labor of the craftsman, had ended after thousands of years, in triumph. The ticking contrivance of wheels, levers, and springs was no longer a mechanical toy; it was a marvelous instrument which was made by man with his head and hands and yet was almost as accurate in its action as the sun and stars themselves.

Here ends the first great division of our story. The scientific problem had been solved; what remained was to democratize the keeping of time; to place mechanism equal to the best of those days within the reach and within the means of every man. In this later development the work was to pass out of the hands of artists and inventors into those of manufacturers. Its history from this point on is no longer a record of science but a romance of industry.