ABSTRACT
The mechanical watchmaking industry has had a long history. According to D.S. Landes,2 the watchmaking industry goes back to sixteenth-century southern Germany.
Later, its base shifted to France, where the design of watches as items of personal adornment reached its peak in the seventeenth century; after this, the base shifted to England, where the precision in timekeeping and rationalization of manufacture achieved new heights with the invention of the hairspring and the division of labor in the eighteenth century. It was in Switzerland in the late eighteenth century that the watchmaking industry attained manufacture on a mass scale for a highly diverse market. Then, in America, the technique of assembling mechanical devices from precision-machined interchangeable parts was applied to watchmaking, achieving similar success as it had achieved in less demanding applications.
