Antique and Vintage Stopwatches

It is generally agreed that the first stopwatch was invented by a British horologist named Samuel Watson, who, in 1695, and at the request of a surgeon named John Flory, created a pocket watch for measuring a patient's pulse that was accurate to one-fifth of a second. Early in the 18th century, clockmaker and fellow Brit, George Graham, set the accuracy bar to one-sixteenth of a second, and by 1816, a French watchmaker named Louis Moinet had introduced the world's first chronograph which he called his compteur de tierces, or "thirds timer," that reduced this margin of error to one-sixtieth of a second, a level of precision that would remain the standard until World War I. The stopwatch that sliced inaccuracy to one-one-hundredth of a second was a Heuer, which was one of many 19th-century watch manufacturers that pushed precision to the limits of mechanical possibility. Timekeepers at the first modern Olympics, hosted by Athens in 1896, held Longines stopwatches in their hands. By the time of the 1920 summer Olympics in Antwerp, Longines stopwatches were replaced by Heuer Mikrographs, which were used until 1932, when Omega became the official timekeeping device of the summer games in Los Angeles. In 1936, it was a Minerva stopwatch that recorded American Jesse Owens' 100-meter dash time of 10.3 seconds, which won him one of four Gold Medals in Berlin. For collectors of antique and vintage stopwatches, early Heuers are much prized. The Mikrographs are highly sought, of course, but so are the Semikrographs, which was a less expensive alternative to the Mikrograph, owing to its less impressive accuracy of just one-fiftieth of a second. Similarly, Heuer offered its sports-minded customers Microsplit and Semicrosplit timers that let a coach compare a runner's first lap with their second. Widely collected stopwatches made after World War II include those used by countless school systems across the United States, Heuer made many of these basic, functional timepieces, as did Breitling, Omega, and Minerva. Naturally, Soviet wristwatch manufacturers kept their citizens supplied with stopwatches, as did British manufacturers such as Meylan and CWC.