The wrist watch is a small sized portable timepiece that is able to display time and in some cases, the day, date as well as month and year. The wrist watch is in fact a comparatively new invention. Originally the first portable time pieces were designed to be kept in the pocket, hence the name “pocket watches” . The first wrist watch was the invention of a person named Patek Philippe who invented it around the end of the nineteenth century and it was then thought of as being a women’s accessory.
It was not until the beginning of the twentieth centaury that the first mens wrist watches began to appear. This was when Alberto Santos Dumont asked his friend Louis Cartier for a watch that could be easily used and the latter responded by giving him a leather-band wrist watch that the gents wrist watch first made an appearance in the beginning of the twentieth century. The benefit of wearing a watch on the wrist was first noticed by men who wore it in this way during World War I who did not need to fumble in their pockets to check what time it was and could merely glance at their wrist watch to ascertain the time. As a consequence, even today most Westerners wear their watches on the wrist, a direct consequence of World War I.
Nowadays wristwatches are available either purely as a time piece and good quality wristwatches are available for less than $100 or you can pay many thousands for a top quality Rolex or Cartier watch which are as much an item of jewellery as a timepiece.
