In the first few decades of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, prices of pocket watches and clocks remained out of reach for the average factory worker. Instead, portable timekeepers were mostly owned by factory owners and capitalists, who used them as instruments for business, but also as status symbols.
Especially prestigious were keyless pocket watches – a new invention in 1842 by Jean-Adrien Philippe, who later became a partner in Patek Philippe. His keyless winding mechanism allowed the watch to be wound via the crown and stem, dispensing with the traditional key. Such watches were known as “stemwinders”, a nickname that eventually came to describe outstanding people or objects, and later on, rousing oratory.
The allure of owning a pocket watch meant there were factory workers who stretched their meagre resources to obtain one, or splurged when they landed an unexpected windfall.
Pocket watches thus became an important asset for members of the working class who were able to own one. E.P. Thompson, in Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism, wrote “the timepiece was the poor man’s bank, an investment of savings: it could, in bad times, be sold or put in hock”.
Some factory workers used watches as a means to reshape power relation between employer and employee, since a worker who owned a pocket watch would be able to contest the dishonest manipulation of production-floor clocks by the factory owner.
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