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Repeating watches, or more precisely, watches that strike the time on gongs, are a natural extension of clocks. In times past, it was not so easy to know the time, particularly during the night, unless a person lit a match or fired up a candle or lamp. Clocks served a useful purpose by striking the time each hour, or quarter hour. But this sudden interruption of sleep was not always welcomed by the entire household.

Cleverly the pocket watch, and today the wristwatch, was equipped with a mechanism that could make a specific sound corresponding to the time without waking the household, or the neighborhood. In the beginning, these watches would only strike the hour, later the quarter hour, then the half/quarter hour, and finally the minutes as well. All of these complicated requests were available only on demand, as needed.

Arguably, and quite possibly, striking watches are the most difficult complication to accomplish in watchmaking. Only one other striking complication, the Sonnerie, is considered the ultimate single watch complication that not only affords the personal objective of hour and quarter hour response on command but also grants the option of sounding to-the-minute when requested.

History

The marriage of music and time in the striking mechanisms of the repeater is a truly technical affair that appeals to each person's inherent sense of the rhythm of time. That the repeater is held in such high regard long after technological advances made it redundant is a testament to this appeal. Daniel Quare's development of 1687 is officially recognized as the first-ever quarter-hour repeater movement. This was the result of a competition between himself and Thomas Tompion, a battle ultimately resolved by the intervention of the English monarch, King James II.

Credit for the invention though goes equally to Edward Barlow, Tompion and Quare. Significantly, Thomas Mudge pioneered the minute repeater in 1750 while Louis Abraham Breguet resolved miss-striking with his all-or-nothing mechanism. The first repeater wristwatch appeared in 1892 but the complication never fared too well in this form, until contemporary times.