The first men’s wristwatch (1904)

Santos-Dumont aboard the 14-bis in November 1906, the month of the flights at which he is said to have worn his Cartier. No watch from 1904 is known to survive, and no photograph of one exists.Photograph: Agence Rol · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

The need: A pilot flying with both hands on the controls could not take a pocket watch out to read it.
Asked for by: Alberto Santos-Dumont, the Brazilian aviator living in Paris, who put the problem to his friend Louis Cartier.
What was new: A man’s watch designed for the wrist from the start: a flat square case, strap attachments built into the case, and screws left visible on the bezel.
Worth knowing: The movements came from Edmond Jaeger. Cartier put the design on sale to the public in 1911 under the name Santos-Dumont, and it has been in production in one form or another ever since.
Where it is now: The original is lost. The earliest surviving Santos watches date from about 1912.

Historian’s noteThe Santos is generally regarded as the first men’s wristwatch, and the label is fair in spirit: wristwatches were then worn by women, and this one was made for a man, a pilot, to do a specific job. Strictly, purpose-made men’s designs had been registered a little earlier, by H. Williamson in 1901 and Dimier Frères in 1903. The date 1904 comes from Cartier’s own chronology; no dated archive record of a 1904 watch has been published, and the first firm date is the 1911 launch.

SourcesFondation de la Haute Horlogerie