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"View Slideshow\n\nIn 18th-century France watches were referred to as \"toys,\" and that aspect\u2014as jewelry, embellishment and, yes, toys for grown-ups\u2014has continued to be as strong a part of their appeal as their function of telling time. A luxury watch is a status symbol, an amusement and a reassuringly solid bulwark against the threat of time's passing.\n\nWatches have been thought of as important jewelry almost since they were invented in the early 16th century in Germany. They have been prized and commissioned by royalty and nobility, the famous and the notorious. They have endured, like one commissioned from the French maker A.-L. Breguet for Marie Antoinette, which was completed decades after her death and recovered after a dramatic theft.\n\nWristwatches, however ubiquitous they are today, did not appear until the latter part of the 19th century, when firms, among them Patek Philippe, began experimenting with the form. At the time, they were called wristlets. Men were heard to say that they would as soon wear a skirt as a wristwatch.\n\nWhen soldiers and sailors began fastening their pocket watches to leather straps on their wrists so that they could see them easily in battle, the idea of the wristwatch as something more than an ornament or a novelty took hold. The German imperial navy is believed to have been equipped with these primitive watches in the 1880s. During the Boer War, the British credited their victory partly to the wristwatch, which allowed them to synchronize flanking attacks against the enemy.\n\nIn the years leading up to and immediately following World War I, wristwatches became increasingly popular with both men and women. The venerable French firm Cartier, which brought out its first wristwatch in 1888 and noted it almost as a curiosity, introduced its famous Santos watch in 1911. It was Cartier's first men's watch on a leather strap (the company patented its d\u00E9ployant buckle in 1909) and was based on the prototype that had been given to the Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont in 1904. Cartier's classic Tank watch, which was designed in honor of the Allied tank crews in the war, was first sold in 1919.\n\nTechnological advances went hand in hand with wristwatches' growing commercial acceptance. Jacques-David LeCoultre, in 1903, had accepted the challenge of Edmond Jaeger, watchmaker to the French navy, to produce the very thin watch movements Jaeger had invented. In 1914 Rolex, founded just a few years before by the Bavarian-born, Swiss-trained Hans Wilsdorf, created a wristwatch that was awarded a \"Class A\" precision certificate, which had previously been given only to marine chronometers. This put to rest, once and for all, the objection that wristwatches were too small to be accurate. In 1926 Rolex developed the first waterproof case, which was worn by Mercedes Gleitze, a young woman swimming the English Channel (she had been drafted by Wilsdorf to endorse the line).\n\nBesides making innovations in watch movements, Jaeger-LeCoultre developed its Reverso, a watch that allowed the wearer to swivel the case to protect the watch glass. Another important achievement by Rolex came in 1956, when it introduced the first watch showing the day and the date. Piaget, in 1958, contributed a further milestone to the history of wristwatch making\u2014the Guinness Book of World Records deemed the company's automatic movement the thinnest.\n\nThough many of the advances in wristwatch making were pioneered by European companies, the American firm Tiffany's got into the act as well. In 1851 an agreement was struck between Charles Lewis Tiffany and Antoine Norbert de Patek, making Tiffany's the first retailer in America to carry Patek Philippe's watches. Later Patek Philippe became the private maker of Tiffany's watches, and the two companies shared a workshop in Geneva. The partnership proved to be an excellent match. Tiffany's received international acclaim for its watches\u2014garnering awards at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition and at the 1889 Paris World's Fair, among others.\n\nIt is impossible to forget that the aesthetic dimension has, and always will be, key to watches' appeal. From the creations of Van Cleef Arpels, the French jeweler that turned its attention to watches in 1910 with great success, to Tiffany's, which has reflected the cultural milieu time and again with its glamorous offerings (think its Cocktail Style pieces of the late 1930s, aimed at the habitu\u00E9s of El Morocco and the Stork Club), to the dramatic, bejeweled animal-inspired pieces from Cartier that were to be found on the wrists of Barbara Hutton and the Duchess of Windsor, what is on the outside of a watch has been just as important as what is inside the case."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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