Wrist & portable
Mechanical Watch Encyclopedia
The wristwatch is not a separate invention but a re-packaging. Its calibres, escapements and complications descend directly from pocket watch practice, and the earliest men's wristwatches were frequently small pocket movements in soldered lug cases.
Full database
Browse the watch types encyclopedia
The family list below is a quick orientation. For full, filterable records — mechanism, identification, variations, collecting notes and pocket-watch ancestry for every watch family — see the type encyclopedia.
Open the watch types encyclopedia →From pocket to wrist
A single mechanical tradition
Wrist-worn watches existed as women’s jewellery well before 1900, but adoption by men followed military use, where reading the time one-handed mattered. Trench watches of 1914–18 are usually small pocket calibres — frequently Swiss cylinder or lever movements — fitted into cases with wire lugs and protective grilles.
The consequences for collectors are practical: early wristwatch movements are identified using pocket-watch methods, and the two fields share the same escapement, jewelling and regulation vocabulary.
Pocket watch encyclopedia →Shared vocabulary
- Escapement type and pallet geometry
- Jewel count and end-stone use
- Positional and isochronal adjustment
- Winding and setting systems
- Case configuration and hallmarking
Taxonomy
Watch families
Manual-wind dress watches
Thin calibres descended directly from Lépine-style pocket architecture.
Automatic watches
Self-winding by rotor or bumper weight; the pivotal twentieth-century convenience.
Field watches
Legible, robust, service-specified; often the plainest and best-engineered.
Pilot watches
Large crowns, high legibility, and in early examples pocket-watch calibres in wrist cases.
Dive watches
Rotating bezels, gasketed cases and tested pressure resistance.
Chronographs
Column-wheel and cam-lever designs; often the first complication a collector studies.
Chronometers
Officially rate-certified watches, a term frequently misused in marketing.
Calendar watches
From simple date to annual and perpetual calendars with leap-year mechanisms.
Moon-phase watches
A 59-tooth wheel gives the familiar 29.5-day approximation.
Tourbillon watches
Rotating carriage averaging positional error — of most benefit in a fixed position.
Alarm watches
Second train and hammer striking the case back or a gong.
World-time and GMT
City rings and second hour indications for travel and aviation.
Equation of time
Displays the difference between mean and apparent solar time.
Jump-hour watches
Digital-style hour disc advancing instantaneously.
Skeleton watches
Plates pierced and engraved to expose the mechanism.
Mystery watches
Hands apparently unconnected to any visible mechanism.
Each family is scheduled to become a standalone reference page with its own movements, makers and identification guidance.