The First Ever Automatic Wristwatches

We might think it’s pretty normal to wear an automatic or self-winding watch, but there is some explaining to do when it comes to the history of the automatic watches, especially the wristwatches. Back in the day, in the 1700s, pocketwatches featured a hand-wound movement with a mainspring to be wound at regular intervals. A couple of years later, the automatic self-winding movement was introduced with natural motions to wind the movement.

Kas Klerx

Chief Content

Updated at: 16/12/2023

What’s an automatic movement?

To be exact: it’s a movement that winds up when there is some natural motion taking place, to make sure your watch keeps running fine. Back in the day, you could only use your watch when it was wounded, with the crown as a mechanical winding mechanism.

Image source: britishmuseum.org

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The first ever automatic movement in a wristwatch was introduced in 1922: 200 years later than the first ever ‘claimed-to-be’ automatic movement in a pocket watch. Léon Leroy was the founder of this automatic movement in 1922, which used a side-weight system which wounds up the movement. Just a year later, John Harwood took out a UK patent and obtained the Swiss patent in 1923, using a pivoting weight which swung as the wearer moved.

This movement made sure that the mainspring was fully wound up, making the watch run fine. The weight could only rotate about 180 degrees, not a full 360. John Harwood was the first ever to produce a movement in a wristwatch that could run up to 12 hours when fully wound, which was unique at the time. Swiss manufacturer Fortis helped Harwood with the production of over 30.000 automatic movements, back in 1928. That really is the basis of the first ever automatic movement in a wristwatch.

And then there was.. Rolex

Yes, we’re writing an article with mentioning Rolex, again. We can’t really help it, since Rolex improved Harwood’s design of the automatic movement in 1930 when using it as the basis of the well-known Rolex Oyster Perpetual. Rolex changed the movement in a way that the weight could actually rotate 360 degrees instead of just 180. Fun fact: Rolex apologized in 1956, since they got away with all the credit of the automatic movement, while John Harwood was the founding father of the automatic movement, giving back the full credit to Harwood.

Image source: rolex.com

Ever since Harwood’s patent ended in 1930, Glycine started to develop their own self-winding mechanism, which was unusual. It features a separate module that could be used in almost any watch (8.75 ligne). Glycine introduced their first automatic module, making it possible to mass-produce watches which was their savior: they survived the global depression and are still making watches today.