Telling time has been a concern from man's earliest recorded history. Man's development of the modern day watch and clock is a remarkable story.
Early watches created in the 15th century had a fundamental problem, they would run faster when freshly wound and get slower and slower as the winding ran down. This practically made the watch not a good keeper of time but a piece of ticking jewelry. Jacob Zech, a Swiss mechanic, living in Austria, about 1525, began studying the problem of the equalization of watch mechanism and invented the principle of the fusee, and Gruet, another Swiss, perfected it.
Watches are usually made from the assembly of hundreds of smaller, individual pieces. Some watch companies manufacture all the pieces of a watch themselves and some purchase some parts and then assemble the watch by combining the purchased parts with their own pieces. And some companies completely outsource the manufacturing and assembly of the watch and in fact become only the brand owner and marketer.
