Hardwood Automatic First Automatic Watch
Here at Barrington, we've spent the last 10 years designing and manufacturing a watch winder that suit all automatic watches. Our aim has always been to create affordable watch winders in a market with overpriced products and cheap alternatives. You take a lot of care and time looking after your wristwatch, so when you put your watch to rest you expect the same treatment.Despite Barrington making leaps and bounds with our winders , the history of the watch winder goes back all the way to 1776 with the first automatic watch. Abram Louys Perrelet, a church elder from Le Locle (Switzerland), created the very first self-winding watch. Using a barrel 'remontoire' (a spring which runs the timekeeping mechanism), the manufacturing of the watch was deemed too expensive and complex. A first nonetheless however and it sparked a revolution of automatic watches.Over 100 hundred years later on the Isle of Man, an English watchmaker known asset out to eliminate the current (at the time) issues of hand wound watches in 1922. One of the main concerns that troubled many watch lovers in the early 20th century was that the winding mechanisms suffered from dust and moisture issues. After looking at ways to eliminate the issue and develop a new winding mechanism, Hardwood noticed the movement of children playing on a see-saw could be used as influence in his watch making process. Using kinetic energy to power a watch was considered a bizarre and revolutionary idea. The watch, in Hardwood's vision, would use accumulated kinetic energy to create tension in the spring of the watch which would release to allow the hands to move. After creating his first prototype with an old pocket watch, he then travelled to the king of watchmaking, Switzerland, for help to create the technical aspects of his invention. Hardwood found great success with the help of the Swiss Confederation in Berne. He was awarded a patent for his pioneering invention of the first self-winding wristwatch in 1924.The self-winding wristwatch made use of a 'hammer' movement, which essentially used "a pivoted oscillating weight that moved to and from through an arc of 270° hitting buffer springs on both sides".With a successful and working self-winding watch in play, FORTIS presented a world first for a mass-produced automatic wristwatch at the Basel Trade Fair in 1926, by no coincidence called the HARWOOD Automatic. The 'wristwatch' was originally aimed at men, but it became quickly apparent that the women of society found the new time keeper to be an essential time saver. With the popularity of automatic watches growing in 1928, the newly founded Harwood Self-Winding Watch Co. brought the HARDWOOD Automatics to an international level with a factory in Grenchen. Despite Hardwood's aim for international success, the automatic grew most noticeably in England's best jewellery shops.In 1931 Hardwood's hammer winding mechanism suffered competition from a newly-invented rotor movement that would wind a watch on a 360 degree movement. This rotor movement was first introduced in the Rolex Oyster Perpetuals. The competition sparked international coverage, with disagreements about the inventor of the self-winding watch. Rolex subsequently apologised in 1956, giving John Harwood full credit as the inventor of the world's first automatic wristwatch with a portrait of him used in Rolex's future advertisement. Despite Hardwood inventing the automatic wristwatch, it's been widely noted that Rolex improved the design with the rotor movement due to its 360° unidirectional winding. A movement still seen in modern automatics of today.
The original watch winder was invented by John Hardwood to guarantee to prospective buyers that his automatic watch movement worked. This initial watch winder was a 12 watch winder, with jewellery shops adopting the machine at a later date to show the quality of the latest automatic watches. 80 years later and watch winders have been adopted by many collectors and lovers looking to display their watches, keep them wound and ready to use. With automatic watches booming, in 2009 the team at Barrington noticed that a lot of these winders were often cheaply made and/or over-priced, which saw the production of our affordable and quality watch winders coming in to play.
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There are a lot of firsts in the watch industry. Seriously, every year sees a slew of ever-more-niche ‘world firsts’ ranging from things as facile as never-before-seen material combinations to esoteric complications stacked on one another into a haute horology puzzle box. Both can be impressive; neither are likely to make their mark on the history of watchmaking any time soon.
In fact, while ‘firsts’ abound, genuinely impactful inventions don’t happen all that often. There just isn’t that much to improve on, at least as far as modern watchmakers understand. So, we thought we’d take a look at one of the most genuinely important firsts in horological history: the first automatic wristwatch.
Most modern watches are automatic. If you’re reading this you likely know what that means, so I’ll be brief: it’s a type of watch movement that doesn’t require winding. You can use the crown to wind them, but they’ll get most of their energy by a rotor (or similar) winding system that coils the mainspring as you wear the watch. It’s an incredibly elegant system and one that we’ve come to take for granted, to the point where a manual-wind is considered charmingly archaic. So where did it come from?
There are two answers (and a lot of dates) to that. The first ever self-winding mechanism is attributed to Abraham-Louis Perrelet back in 1777. It was genuinely the first of its kind, a movement that from one starting impulse, would continue to run indefinitely using a barrel remontoire. In theory.
The problem was that it was built for pocket watches (those, incidentally by another famous watchmaking Abraham-Louis) which tended to remain static in a pocket most of the time. This meant that the movement didn’t always get enough energy to keep it going. Throw in the fact that it was expensive to make and it’s obvious why it never really took off.
By the 1800s in fact, Perrelet’s automatic movement just wasn’t being used by most pocket watch fancying dandies, and it wouldn’t be for over a century before a similar concept would emerge – here in our very isles. The Isle of Man, to be precise. Apparently that’s where all our legendary watchmaking talent ends up.
Harwood Automatic (1929), image credit: The British Museum
The self-winding movement as we know it was built by John Harwood in 1922. In the search for a way to power his watch, he noticed children playing on a seesaw and, in a moment of innovative genius, applied the concept to winding.
This is the winding rotor that’s become an integral part of modern watchmaking. In Harwood’s own terms, it used “a pivoted oscillating weight that moved to and from through an arc of 270° hitting buffer springs on both sides”. The British watchmaker experimented with a proof-of-concept pocket watch before heading to Switzerland and subsequently getting the patent for a self-winding wristwatch in 1924.
Two years later, the movement was mass-produced by FORTIS in a watch dubbed, fittingly, the HARWOOD Automatic, and in 1928 Harwood set up his own company to produce the design. Funnily enough, he also designed the first watch winder, to prove that his watches worked. Then Rolex came onto the scene.
In 1931, Rolex released a superior, 360°-winding mechanism in the Oyster Perpetual. This was essentially the automatic movement in its final form, with tweaks between now and then. It’s largely why Rolex sometimes get the credit for the first self-winding calibres – credit that at the time they took, sparking disagreements in the watch world. Theirs was better for sure, but in 1956 Rolex apologised for taking the credit, giving Harwood full credit.
Since then there have been a few variations on the self-winding watch, such as IWC’s Pellaton system, but on the whole it’s the same as Harwood’s initial designs, with Rolex’s rotor. Abraham-Louis Perrelet’s pocket watch version is still historically relevant and laid the groundwork for the concept, but when it comes to who created the first, proper automatic movement, it’s generally laid at Harwood’s feet.
See? We got there eventually.