While pocket watches required the watch owner to actually walk around with the watch, wristwatches featuring an automatic mechanism would wind whenever a person moved his or her arm up and down.This meant that virtually all movements resulted in automatic winding.The first person to apply the automatic concept to the wristwatch was a man by the name of John Harwood.Harwood took out patents involving mechanisms that became known as "hammers" or "bumpers."
While this mechanism only wound the watch when it was moved in one direction, it did allow for 12 hours of autonomous watch functionality when it was fully wound.This watch was produced in a lot of 30000, and was the first commercially successful automatic watch.Rolex provided the final push towards the almost universal adoption of the automatic watch.
In 1930, the Rolex Watch Company improved John Harwood's mechanism design in order to allow the watch to wind from movement in any direction.The company also improved the capacity of the mainspring to store the energy created by this movement, enabling the watch to run autonomously for up to 35 hours.Rolex's adoption of this technology led many other companies to develop their own automatic watches, and by the 1960s, automatic watches were being sold by countless manufacturers.
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