I got my first wrist watch when I turned five. I can barely remember it now, but it was some sort of a Mickey Mouse watch. The two hands of Mickey Mouse showed the time and as I recall, I was extremely proud of this wrist watch. It was much later, when I became a man, so to speak, that my father gave me the family wrist watch. This was an old wind-up wrist watch. It was a Rolex that had once belonged to my grandfather. Although I knew that it was a symbolic wrist watch, I kept it aside and donned several other, sportier, and in my opinion more contemporary wrist watches. I had no inkling that it could be worth a great deal of money. It was only years later, when I ran into a wrist watch collector, that I realized its true worth. Now, although I still keep it aside, it rests within a security case and adorns the display stand in my living room. Who could have ever thought that a wrist watch could have such special treatment!

There are also several other specialty wrist watches out there in the market. There are special medical wrist watches that monitor the heart rates of patients, there are exercise wrist watches that keep track of the number of laps you have run, and at what degree of comfort. There are wrist watches for diabetic patients which remind them when it is time for the next insulin dose. There are also medical wrist watches, which calculate various concentrations of elements in the blood stream and advise wearer on suitable medication. It is not just medicine that has created unique wrist watches. Engineers too have their own pressure monitoring and altitude specific wrist watches. Divers have depth measuring wristwatches. And computer buffs, have recently gotten hold of a very special wrist watch.

The technology age has also changed the way we look at wrist watches. Recently, IBM, the company that pioneered the personal computer, introduced a Linux based wrist watch in the Banglinux conference. This nifty little wrist watch redefines the way most of us have been viewing wrist watches. Sure, there have been wrist watches in the past (most notably from the Japanese electronics giant, Casio) that combine the many applications of the personal computer or the hand held PC. But this new wrist watch will totally change all that. Its features make those of earlier models look obsolete. It comes with a mother board, a touch sensitive display facility, 8 MB of flash memory, 8 MB of DRAM and even radio frequency wireless connectivity. What this means that for all you mail freaks out there is that you can actually download your e-mail on the go. To your wrist watch!

Mechanical stopwatches are powered by a spring mechanism that must be continuously wound, and operate at the control of two or more buttons. Pressing the buttons starts and stops the time tracking mechanism, displayed by second and minute hands, which can be reset to a starting position by pushing an additional button. For most purposes, mechanical chronographs are accurate enough, though anyone desiring a high degree of accuracy will use a digital stopwatch. Capable of displaying tenths, hundredths, even thousandths of seconds, and using the same extremely accurate and reliable oscillator found in quartz watches, digital chronographs are the most popular form of the chronograph today.

The first chronograph like instrument was developed in 1720 by an Englishman named Graham, who is today referred to as ‘the Father of the Chronograph’. His invention was basically a clock that could start and stop quickly to measure elapsed time during a specific event, and it was accurate within a sixteenth of a second. Although by today’s standards that is horribly inaccurate, it was marveled at in its day.

The first actual chronograph was made about a century later by a Frenchman named Rieussec. His clock had dots on it to measure the elapsed time, and was the first to bear the name ‘chronograph’. His invention used a pen to mark onto the dial itself an arc whose length could be used to measure how long the mechanism had operated for.

The Greek roots of the word ‘chronograph’ suggest that it actually means ‘time writing’, and since Rieussec’s invention was the only one to involve writing it is the only real chronograph. Chronographs today are more accurately described as stopwatches, in that they are capable of measuring elapsed time but do no recording of any sort. Although it is technically a misnomer, many people still refer to stopwatches as chronographs, and the names are for nearly all intents and purposes interchangeable.

Many wristwatches today have built in stopwatches of their own, of both digital and mechanical varieties. Analog wristwatches that have a built in mechanical stopwatch are simply referred to as chronographs, and usually carry a heftier price tag due to their complexity.