There's a Reason the Luxury Watch Market Is Dominated By This Kind of Timepiece

Almost all luxury watches made today are automatic, even though the technology was only introduced relatively recently A couple years after Perrelet, Abraham-Louis Breguet, a famous watch inventor who created the tourbillon, made his own version of the automatic watch: this one had a movement powered by a weight that swung against a pair of springs So after the early 1800s, people like Breguet stopped bothering to make watches with automatic movements.

The British watch repairman John Harwood picked up the cause of automatic movements in the 1920s, inventing a "Bumper" system that pushed a weight back and forth in a semicircle and wound the spring that powered the watch in the process In 1933, Rolex created a weight that rotated a full 360° that closely mirrors the system automatic watches use today From there, automatic watches took over as the standard for high-end timepieces, so much so that other pieces of technology rushed to keep up with horology's new favorite timekeeping method.

While some watch houses still make self-wound mechanical watches, automatics now make up a majority of the luxury timepiece market. . Source