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The earliest watches were ornate, exorbitantly expensive contraptions that contributed more to their wearers' social status than to their punctuality. They had no minutes hands, which would have been pointless on timepieces that could barely register the correct hour.
Furthermore, they were a royal nuisance (and royalty were just about the only people who could afford them), needing to be wound with a key twice a day. People wore them around their necks or carried them in purses. (Elizabeth I of England, who lived from 1533 to 1603, reportedly bucked convention when it came to watches as she did in much else. She is said to have worn a "ring" watch that alerted her to the arrival of a pre-set hour by scratching her finger with a metal projection.)
Accuracy improved gradually through the 16th and first part of the 17th centuries. Then, around 1675, it made a quantum leap due to the second great invention in watch history, the "balance" or "hair" spring. The balance spring was an unprecedentedly precise way of regulating the oscillations of the balance. Most historians give credit for the invention to Christiaan Huygens of Holland. The balance spring made watches accurate to within an amazing 5 minutes a day. There would not be a comparable leap in watch accuracy until the first electronic watch, Bvlova's Accutron (developed by the Swiss electrical engineer Max Hetzel), appeared in 1960.
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