Pocket Watches - Heralding time in a bygone era

 There are covered pocket watches as well as open pocket watches. The user can close the watch with its cover with covered pocket watches. The covers are embossed with various decorations and they are of valued materials as well. Most antique pocket watches are of this type. Open ones have no covers but their dials are finished very attractively with different styles. In the earlier days as far back as 1890, conductors of the British Railways used open pocket watches and they are called railroad pocket watches. Most pocket watches are in the round shape. Nevertheless, they are available in other shapes such as square and oval as well.

Antique pocket watches are run with a mechanical device and they have to be wound. Internal gears operate within them and in harmony with their running, the time is shown. This system is called the mechanical clock work and the watches of this type are called mechanical pocket watches. However, these ancient pocket watches are now very expensive. Like any other antique items, value of these types of watches have also increased manifold as time passes. People who own them rarely give them away for the need of money since they know how valuable they can be in years to come.

Apart from them, most recent pocket watches are battery operative. The users do not have to wind them up since this type of watches operates until its batteries power them. The user has to change the batteries if the battery is without power. Most battery operated watches contain no jewels upon which the arms of the clocks runs. Therefore, comparatively with antique watches, they are very cheap. Mostly these watches are based on quartz to run the clock arms unlike mechanical pocket watches that use a vibrating fork to run the time. With time, mechanical pocket watches cannot provide the user with the right time, as the vibrating fork gets weakened due to long usage. Nevertheless, this problem is not present with quartz pocket watches, hence they are durable.

In addition, there are pocket watches made of precious metals like gold, silver and embellished with diamonds. In fact, this type of watch is the most valuable pocket watches. Nevertheless, the problem with pocket watches made of precious material is they can be easily broken. For example, a pocket watch made of 14k gold can be discoloured very fast. To avoid this problem, watch manufacturers use brass or similar material between two gold layers making the material studier when producing gold pocket watches. Most precious metal pocket watches are personalized ones.