Watches go to war

Before 1914 a watch worn on the wrist was mostly a woman's ornament; Wikipedia's history says early 'wristlets' were made for women for about their first hundred years, and NPR, drawing on the Smithsonian, says men rarely wore them before the war.^2, 9

Military use came earlier, but how much earlier is disputed. Wikipedia says Girard-Perregaux and other Swiss makers supplied German naval officers with wristwatches in about 1880; Worn & Wound tells it as an 1879 order from Kaiser Wilhelm I to Constant Girard for 2,000 gold watches, but notes that none has been recovered intact and that the brand’s modern example is built from records. No naval record of the order appears in the sources read for this page.^1, 9, 12

British soldiers wore watches on straps in colonial wars. Worn & Wound describes men in the Boer War of 1899 to 1902 fitting wire lugs and leather straps to small pocket watches; Wikipedia adds that Mappin & Webb advertised a 'campaign watch' as in production since the Sudan campaign of 1898, an advertising claim, and that the London firm Garstin patented a 'Watch Wristlet' in 1893.^9, 22

Wikipedia says officers took to wristwatches as early as the First Boer War of 1880 to 1881; Worn & Wound places the practice in the Second Boer War.^9, 22

Aviation gave the wrist watch its first famous male wearer. Cartier says that in 1904 Louis Cartier made a watch so that the Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont could tell the time while flying; Monochrome says the watch, made with the movement maker Edmond Jaeger, went on sale in 1911.^{9, 23, 24}

Who made the first wristwatch has no single answer. Cartier calls the Santos one of the first; Monochrome credits Patek Philippe; Wikipedia names a Breguet watch of 1810 for the Queen of Naples, and the Girard-Perregaux naval watches as the first series for men.^{1, 23, 24}

In the trenches a pocket watch was hard to reach. Doran Cart of the National WWI Museum is quoted on belts, whistles and gas masks leaving no room; Wikipedia simply says pocket watches were not practical in combat.^1, 2

Timing became a weapon. The Smithsonian curator Carlene Stephens has said that artillery cover for an advance was an elaborately timed, choreographed movement, and that pilots used the watch as a fuel gauge.²

Most early trench watches were converted pocket watches: lugs soldered on for a strap, hinged covers kept, white enamel dials with large numerals and radium-painted hands, sometimes a pierced metal 'shrapnel guard' over the glass. A Science Museum Group object shows the conversion: an Ingersoll 'Sterling' in a case hallmarked 1915, with lugs added at 12 and 6.^1, 10

Officers generally bought their own. Capt. B. C. Lake's handbook of 1916 lists a luminous wristwatch with unbreakable glass as officer's kit, and from 1917 the British Army issued a limited number of luminous wristwatches with the broad arrow, mainly to signallers and engineers.^1, 9, 22

Not every army followed. Worn & Wound says the wristwatch did not catch on in German military circles during the First World War as it did in the British and American forces.¹²

The war changed civilian habits, most accounts agree, though the causal claim comes from commentators rather than sales records of the time: a 1917 Horological Journal is quoted that the wristlet 'was little used by the sterner sex before the war'; by 1930 Switzerland exported as many wristwatches as pocket watches, and by 1934 nearly twice as many; the National WWII Museum says wristwatches outsold pocket watches by the end of the 1920s.^2, 9, 11

Luminous dials needed radium. The Radium Luminous Material Corporation was founded in 1914 by Sabin von Sochocky and George S. Willis and opened a plant at Orange, New Jersey, in 1917; it became the United States Radium Corporation in 1921 and sold its paint as Undark.^{28, 29, 30}

Wikipedia says Ingersoll's Radiolite watches of 1916 helped make radium dials popular, and wartime demand for luminous instruments followed.²⁸

The painters, mostly young women, were taught to point their brushes between their lips, swallowing radium with every dial. A dial painter had died by 1923; by 1924 about fifty former workers at Orange were ill and about a dozen were dead.^{32, 33, 34}

Five former painters, Grace Fryer, Katherine Schaub, Edna Hussman, Albina Larice and Quinta McDonald, sued from 1927 against a two-year statute of limitations. They accepted a settlement on 4 June 1928; the agreement in the National Archives is dated 8 June: $10,000 each, $600 a year for life, and medical costs approved by a committee of three doctors.^{29, 32, 33}

In Ottawa, Illinois, women at the Radium Dial Company, which painted dials mainly for Westclox, won before the Illinois Industrial Commission in 1938 with the lawyer Leonard Grossman; Catherine Wolfe Donohue died in July 1938, and on 23 October 1939 the US Supreme Court declined the company's final appeal.^32, 33

The cases are remembered as a turning point for occupational health law in the United States; a radium tolerance limit was set by the National Bureau of Standards in 1941, partly from data on dial painters.^32, 33

Radium went on glowing on military watches until tritium replaced it from the 1970s; Panerai's own Radiomir and Luminor names record that change.^13, 28

Between the wars air navigation needed exact time. The Smithsonian holds a pair of Waltham 'avigation' watches made for the Army Air Corps around 1934, and a Waltham second-setting watch on the Weems system that belonged to Charles Lindbergh, links to the pilot's watch story.^{37, 38, 39}

Germany's air ministry wrote the most famous specification: the Beobachtungsuhr, a 55 mm navigator's watch built by five firms, A. Lange & Söhne, Wempe, Laco, Stowa and IWC.^{3, 12, 40}

German ground forces received small 'DH' service watches from well over thirty makers, many Swiss, such as Longines, Record, Omega and IWC; the Schild AS 1130 movement was common enough to be called the Wehrmachtswerk.¹²

The United States Army Air Forces bought the A-11: a minimum 15-jewel movement whose seconds stopped when the crown was pulled, so that crews could set their watches together to the second.^{4, 11, 43}

Britain's War Office drew up the W.W.W. ('watch, wristlet, waterproof') specification: black dial, luminous hands and numerals, shatter-resistant crystal, a 15-jewel movement in a case sealed against water and dust. Twelve Swiss firms delivered about 145,000, mostly from May 1945; collectors call them the 'Dirty Dozen'.^{5, 11, 22}

Japan's Seikosha made infantry, naval and air-force wristwatches distinguished by a star, an anchor or a cherry blossom on the dial, and the Tensoku ('astronomical observation') pilot's watch from about 1940; Worn & Wound says Seikosha appears to have been the only Japanese maker with military wristwatch contracts.⁴⁴

Italy's navy took a different path: from 1935 Panerai of Florence supplied luminous diving watches to its underwater assault units, built on a base supplied by Rolex.^13, 14

In the United States, watch factories went to war. After Pearl Harbor makers were barred from new civilian watches except railroad watches and special instruments; Waltham, Elgin, Hamilton and Bulova made bomb timers and navigation, pilot and infantry watches, the great majority of American military watches.^6, 11

Hamilton built the Navy's marine chronometer. Prototypes of its Model 21 reached the Naval Observatory on 27 February 1942, and by mid-1945 it had delivered 10,902, most to the Navy; Hamilton says it made over a million timepieces in 1942 to 1945.^6, 15

Smaller firms converted entirely. In February 1942 the Office for Emergency Management photographed the Wadsworth Watch Case Company in Kentucky turning from watch cases and compacts to bomb fuze baffles, compass cases, radio parts and parts for carbines and machine guns.^45, 46

In Germany, Glashütte's makers were part of the armaments industry from late 1938: observation watches, chronographs, marine chronometers and time fuzes. Wempe in Hamburg and A. Lange & Söhne built a standard naval chronometer, the Einheitschronometer, from 1942; Wempe's company history says its wartime workforce of up to 200 included forced labourers from Russia and France.^{17, 49, 50}

Germany never freed itself from Swiss supply: the German Wikipedia's account says that despite great efforts it remained dependent on watches from Switzerland, and Worn & Wound lists Swiss makers among the suppliers of its service watches.^3, 12

In Japan, the Seiko Museum says the war forced Seikosha and Daini Seikosha into full war production, as the firm had made shell fuses since the Russo-Japanese War; civilian output had virtually stopped by 1945, the Kameido watch factory was destroyed, and production restarted in evacuation factories at Kiryu, Toyama, Sendai and Suwa.^20, 51

The Soviet Union's First Moscow Watch Factory, built in 1930 with machinery bought from the American Dueber-Hampden company, was evacuated as the Germans approached in 1941. Accounts differ on where: Wikipedia's Poljot article says to Zlatoust, its Vostok article says to Chistopol, where a new factory first made military equipment.^52, 53

Surrounded by the Axis after 1940, Switzerland traded with both sides. The US National Archives' finding aid says its factories produced precision instruments, fuses, clocks and watches, and that by 1943 Germany took nearly a third of all Swiss exports.⁷

The Allies answered with a black list of Swiss firms trading with the Axis. Under an agreement of 19 December 1943 the Swiss limited exports to Germany, and the Allies lifted their embargo and promised to black-list firms on specific proof alone.⁷

Swiss watches also crossed to the Allies. The same finding aid says a third of all Swiss watches went to the United States in 1943 and 1944, freeing American watch factories for war work, and the National WWII Museum says that by 1945 the US Army in Europe was buying Swiss watches too.^7, 11

Swiss firms supplied every side's specifications: IWC built German observation watches, twelve Swiss firms the British W.W.W., and Swiss makers many German service watches.^3, 5, 12

One maker's wartime trade became a legend. Rolex sent watches to British prisoners of war on credit; an auction catalogue of 2007 describes an Oyster Chronograph sent in July 1943 to Corporal Clive Nutting at Stalag Luft III, with Hans Wilsdorf's letter telling him not to think of paying during the war.⁵⁴

Europa Star says Switzerland kept its watchmaking know-how to itself where it could: in trade talks with the Soviet Union it refused to sell watch-manufacturing machinery, and the trade agreement signed on 24 February 1941 collapsed after Germany invaded the Soviet Union that June.⁵⁵

Glashütte was bombed on 8 May 1945 and its factories dismantled by the Soviet occupying power, then expropriated and merged into one state company; the story continues under VEB Glashütter Uhrenbetriebe.^16, 17

Some German knowledge went east. WatchTime says the Einheitschronometer was later made by the First Moscow Watch Factory; collector accounts that Glashütte equipment went to Moscow as reparations are not confirmed by a record read for this page.⁴⁹

Stalin chose the name Pobeda, 'Victory', for a new Soviet wristwatch in April 1945, built on a movement licensed earlier from the French firm LIP; the first prototype came from Penza at the end of 1945 and production spread to Moscow and Petrodvorets.^21, 52

American makers lost their head start. The National WWII Museum argues that wartime exposure to Swiss watches undid the US industry; Waltham went bankrupt in 1949 and Elgin ended US manufacturing in 1968.^{11, 56, 57}

The war also left veterans to retrain: Arde Bulova founded the tuition-free Joseph Bulova School of Watchmaking in 1945 for disabled veterans; its opening class graduated 20 of them.^58, 59

Military rules became civilian forms. Stowa and Laco build their pilot's watches on the B-Uhr dial patterns, Panerai's navy watches became a civilian line in 1993, and the hacking seconds, luminous dials, soft-iron cases and screw-down crowns of wartime specifications live on in tool watches, pilot's watches and diving watches.^{11, 13, 18, 19}

The thread leads on: from the instrument watch to the electronic one. Hamilton, which built the Navy's chronometers, sold an electric wristwatch in 1957, the start of the electric and quartz revolution.^11, 15