If you have ever received a speeding ticket, you can thank the watch industry: It has played a leading role in measuring how fast a car can go and how fast it shouldn’t.
That connection began with the invention of the chronograph, essentially a stopwatch. In 1816, the French watchmaker Louis Moinet made the first chronograph, the combination of a watch that kept time and an independent second hand that could be stopped manually, measuring to 1/60th of a second. (He also was an astronomer and used his invention to make astronomical observations.)
In 1821 Nicolas Rieussec, one of the king’s watchmakers, created an iteration that would place an ink dot on the dial to record a time. When he wanted to present it to the French Academy of Sciences, it needed a name — so he turned to the Greek language, combining its word for time, chronos, with the word for writing, graph. Examples of such chronographs are in the collections of the British Museum in London and the Patek Philippe Museum in Geneva.
The chronograph eventually made a leap from measuring the speed of horses to that of automobiles, but not before trains and tractors had their turn. “Numerical speed limits restricting the velocity of trains appeared in Britain as early as 1861,” said Miranda Marraccini, the librarian at the Horological Society of New York.
And in roughly the same period, according to Tim Mosso, a watch specialist at the 1916 Company, formerly known as WatchBox, Parliament also passed laws restricting the speed of early steam-powered tractors.
“Initially, you would have had these very agrarian bucolic roads designed for horses and carts, and you would have had these enormous road locomotives, which were basically tractors, beginning to appear,” Mr. Mosso said. “You couldn’t control their weight, but you could control their speed. Weight and speed both wear down dirt roads very quickly. So in order to try to preserve the roads and general safety, the Locomotive Acts were passed.”
Concern continued when automobiles, the first invented in 1885 by Carl Benz, started to appear on roads. “There are many early, strange laws in America requiring motorists to alert other people and animals using the road to their approach,” Dr. Marraccini said. “A now-famous proposal by the Farmers Anti Automobile Society in Pennsylvania would have required a driver to disassemble their car and hide its parts in the bushes to avoid spooking a horse.”
By the late 1800s, speed limits began to appear in the United States and Europe, but enforcing them was awkward. “It seems to be true that police, riding bicycles or motorcycles, used chronographs to time cars and issue speeding fines,” Dr. Marraccini said.
Mr. Mosso said that some police monitored the roads on horseback or even on foot, as they could compare the time it took a vehicle to cover a distance with that of a vehicle known to have driven the same distance at the specified speed limit.
Or, the car’s actual speed could be calculated. “What you would do is start your watch at the point the vehicle crosses the start line, and then stop it when it reaches the end,” Mr. Mosso said. “Based on the known distance, the time, and a little bit of math, you can work out the speed.”
Life became easier for the police when the tachymeter came into use by the early part of the 19th century; it did the math for them.
As Horopedia, an encyclopedia of watchmaking, says: “A tachymeter is a scale that measures speed. It is either printed or engraved on the outside of the dial or on the bezel. It allows to measure an average speed, for example in kilometers per hour, by measuring the time to make one kilometer. This scale can of course also be applied to other units such as miles per hour for example.”
So, if it took 60 seconds to travel one mile, a tachymeter would show 60, meaning 60 miles per hour.
Breitling was one of the first watch brands to offer a tachymeter, designed and manufactured by the company’s founder, Leon Breitling, as a pocket watch called the Vitesse (in English, speed).
“Leon Breitling registered the name Vitesse and the design in 1905, as well as a different version in 1907,” said Fred Mandelbaum, the brand’s historian. And, according to brand lore, Breitling’s innovation changed the lives of every motorist in Switzerland.
Mr. Mandelbaum recounted a story that he said had been “passed down in family history, from Leon to Gaston then to Willy and then to Gregory, who published the story in a company leaflet. It says Leon was contacted by the Swiss police and asked if he would provide these Vitesse pocket watches to the police to issue speeding tickets.”
He did and, according to the brand, the police in Switzerland issued their first speeding ticket in 1906.
Today the police use a variety of methods, including radar and light detection systems, to determine whether a car is speeding. But the whole concept of setting a speed for a road, monitoring it and enforcing had its roots in the watch industry — just another example of how watches have changed our lives in more ways than simply telling time.
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