The first watches
Watches have been continuously evolving since the 15th century which saw the invention of the portable spring driven clock to the armbanduhren watch of today . With the invention of the mainspring, portable timepieces became possible. Many sources have wrongfully attributed the invention of the mainspring to Peter Henlein, a Nuremberg clockmaker, in 1511. Henlein has also been erroneously attributed with inventing the first ever pocket-watches.
Why have historians looked towards Peter Henlein as the source of the first pocket-watches? It is because of a passage written in 1511 by Johann Cochläus which reads; “Peter Hele, still a young man, fashions works which even the most learned mathematicians admire. He shapes many-wheeled clocks out of small bits of iron, which run and chime the hours without weights for forty hours, whether carried at the breast or in a handbag.” Yet during that period there were numerous German clockmakers fashioning the same timepieces with no evidence to suggest that Henlein was the first.