The Watch That Was Never Shaped Like an Egg

Around 1505, a Nuremberg clockmaker helped free timekeeping from the wall, and picked up a nickname that was a mistranslation.

Fact rating: Myth

A weight-driven clock needs somewhere to hang its weight, which is why, for centuries, clocks belonged to towers and walls. What changed that was a different kind of power: a strip of steel, coiled tightly inside a drum, that could push a mechanism forward without ever needing to fall. In Nuremberg, in the first years of the 1500s, that coiled mainspring drove clocks small enough to carry.

The name usually attached to that moment is Peter Henlein, and the nickname usually attached to his watches is the 'Nuremberg egg'. Both deserve a closer look. Here is what the records say about the man, what the spring and its helpers did, what the oldest watches turned out to be when a museum looked inside them, and how a word for 'little clock' became a little egg.

A locksmith people wrote about

Peter Henlein was born in Nuremberg around 1480 to 1485 and trained as a locksmith. In 1504 he was caught up in a brawl in which another locksmith died, and he took sanctuary in the city's Franciscan friary. He became a master of the locksmiths' guild in 1509, and he died in Nuremberg in 1542.

His fame rests on a few lines by the humanist Johannes Cochlaeus, written around 1511 and printed in 1512 in a short description of Germany. Every day, Cochlaeus wrote, finer things are invented: Peter Hele, still quite a young man, makes small clocks of iron with a great many wheels which, whichever way they are turned and without any weight, show the hours and 'pulsant' for forty hours, even when carried at the breast or in a purse. Scholars still argue whether pulsant means they struck the hours or simply that they ticked.

City records then show him at work. In January 1524 the council paid him 15 gulden for a gilded musk-apple with a clock inside it: a pomander, the little pierced ball that wealthy people filled with scent. In 1547 the Nuremberg writer Johann Neudörfer said that a Henlein was nearly the first to fit clocks into such musk-balls, though he gave the first name as Andreas.

The spring was already old

What Henlein did not do is invent the mainspring. The oldest surviving spring-driven clock is a gilded table clock about 48 centimetres tall, made around 1430 to 1440 and carrying the arms of Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy. Its coiled spring sits hidden in the base, already joined to a fusee, a device we will come to in a moment. That clock is now in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, the city that later claimed the watch for itself.

A tall gilded table clock shaped like a Gothic church, with two pointed spires topped by small lions, open tracery through which wheels can be seen, a round dial with Roman numerals and a single hand low down, and a box-like base standing on four small animal feet. — *The table clock of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, about 1430 to 1440: the oldest surviving clock driven by a spring. Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg.* Photo: Daderot, CC0, cropped and toned, via Wikimedia Commons.

Small clocks worn on the body were not a Nuremberg secret either. In 1488 a report to the Duke of Ferrara said that Ludovico Sforza in Milan was having three fancy jackets made, each with a tiny chiming clock attached. What Nuremberg had, in Henlein, was a maker whose small clocks someone thought worth writing down.

A push that fades

The spring came with a flaw of its own. A freshly wound spring pushes hard; a tired one, hours later, pushes weakly, so early portable clocks ran fast right after winding and slowed as the day went on. Their regulator, a swinging bar or wheel with no spring of its own, was very sensitive to how hard it was pushed. Melanchthon's watch of 1530, further down this page, ran for 12 to 16 hours on a winding and told the time to roughly the nearest half hour, with a single hand.

Clockmakers answered with two devices. The stackfreed, used only in some German clocks and watches, is a stiff curved spring whose roller presses on a snail-shaped cam. It brakes the mainspring hardest when it is fully wound and less and less as it runs down. It wasted a lot of power, but it was thin and sat on the back of the movement, which kept watches flat. Surviving examples date from about 1530 to 1640.

Line drawing of the back of an early watch movement: a long curved spring arm, labelled A, runs round the edge and ends in a roller, B, that presses on a snail-shaped cam, D, fixed to a toothed wheel, E, turned by a small pinion, C. — *How a stackfreed works: a stiff spring arm (A) presses its roller (B) on a snail-shaped cam (D), turned once per running by the mainspring's pinion (C) and wheel (E). A modern diagram.* Photo: HPV, public domain, toned, via Wikimedia Commons.

The fusee was the lasting answer: a cone-shaped pulley joined to the spring's barrel by a cord. When the spring is fully wound it pulls on the narrow top of the cone; as it weakens, it pulls on wider and wider grooves, gaining leverage just as it loses strength, so the push reaching the wheels stays even. The first cords were gut; fine chains took over around the middle of the seventeenth century. The Burgundy clock already had a fusee, and so does the Nuremberg museum's own early drum watch.

Drawing, not to scale; the curves show the idea, not measurements. The first fusees ran on a gut cord; fine chains came later.

What the oldest watches turned out to be

Since 1897 the Germanisches Nationalmuseum has owned a gilt-brass drum watch, barely the size of a palm, with an iron movement and an inscription inside its lid: 'Petrus Hele me f. Norimb. 1510', Peter Hele made me, Nuremberg, 1510. If that were true, it would be the oldest watch in the world. Experts doubted the signature from the start, and a museum guide of 1930 already called it a later forgery.

In 2013 and 2014 the museum looked properly, with raking light and 3D computer tomography, alongside seven other small watches claimed as the oldest. The verdict: the movement is of an early sixteenth-century type, but the watch was put together in the nineteenth century from older and newer parts, shows little wear, and carries a forged signature. It even came with a turned wooden case from the nineteenth century, shaped like an egg.

Of the eight, the watch with the fewest later changes was a gilded ball, a pomander watch, engraved underneath 'PHIL. MELA. GOTT. ALEIN. DIE. EHR. 1530': Philipp Melanchthon, to God alone the glory, 1530. It is the earliest dated watch known, and it belongs to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, which says the 2014 study found it consistent with an attribution to Henlein. Consistent is not proven: it carries no maker's mark.

A small engraved metal ball opened on its hinge: the left half shows a round dial with Roman numerals and a single short hand; the right half, the lid, is pierced with round and diamond-shaped holes. — *Melanchthon's watch, dated 1530, the earliest dated watch known: a pomander, or musk-ball, with an iron movement. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.* Photo: Walters Art Museum, public domain, cropped and toned, via Wikimedia Commons.

A second pomander, engraved 'MDV PHN', which its supporters read as 1505, Peter Henlein, Nuremberg, is often called the world's first watch online. It was found in a box of old metal parts bought at a London flea market in 1987 and is privately owned. In December 2014 its owner's spokesman presented tests by the owner's experts and complained that scientists had long neglected it; the tiny 'PH' marks it relies on are, in the same press release's words, disputed by some scientists. It was not among the watches the museum studied, so 1505 remains a claim, not a date.

How a craftsman became the inventor

Cochlaeus praised Henlein, but he never called him the inventor of the watch. That title came later. In 1730 the Nuremberg mathematician Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr listed 'Peter Hele, der Erfinder der Sack-Uhren', the inventor of pocket watches. In the nineteenth century, as nations competed at world fairs, the German clock trade adopted him as its founding hero. Nuremberg and the German watchmakers' association put up a Henlein fountain in 1905, and in 1938 the director Veit Harlan made him the hero of a feature film, The Immortal Heart.

The museum now calls that attribution refuted. It credits the watch instead to a 'technical intelligentsia': several European workshops, working at the same time but independently, that solved the problem of a clock worn on the body during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Henlein was real, skilled and admired in his own day. He was one of the first, not the only one.

Little clocks, little eggs

In German, a little clock is an Ührlein. In 1575 the Strasbourg writer Johann Fischart published a wild, word-playing German version of Rabelais's Gargantua. In its 1582 edition, as the great Deutsches Wörterbuch quotes it, he mentions the 'nörnbergischen lebendigen aeurlein', the living little clocks of Nuremberg. The dictionary describes Eierlein, little eggs, as a folk reinterpretation of Ührlein: a familiar word taking the place of a less familiar one.

When that happened is not certain. English Wikipedia says Fischart himself wrote Eierlein; the dictionary's quotation of his text says aeurlein. By 1730 at the latest the egg had won: Doppelmayr wrote that watches had long been called the 'living little eggs' of Nuremberg because the first ones were made in the shape of small eggs, and he pointed to the German Rabelais for the phrase. A German book on clocks still gave the egg shape as the reason in 1851. Either way, the egg came decades or centuries after Henlein's first watches, and by 1730 it carried an invented explanation.

Drawing, not to scale. The 'Nuremberg egg' name came decades, perhaps a century or more, after the first watches.

The real early watches were drums, like the one at the top of this page, or balls, like Melanchthon's; the Walters Art Museum notes that it is not clear which shape came first. Oval cases came later, in the second half of the sixteenth century, and were common by the early seventeenth, so by the time anyone wrote about Nuremberg eggs there really were watches shaped a little like eggs. It has even been suggested that the name helped the fashion along.

An oval watch case hanging from a ring and pendant, its whole surface engraved with scrolling foliage around a standing female figure with a peacock beside her. — *An oval watch by Charles Peiras, about 1620, engraved after designs by Étienne Delaune. A century after the first watches, this is the shape the 'egg' name fits. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.* Photo: Walters Art Museum, public domain, cropped and toned, via Wikimedia Commons.

From a musk-ball to a power reserve

A modern mechanical watch still runs on a coiled mainspring, now a thin strip of hardened steel or special alloy, wound round an arbor inside a barrel that turns as the spring lets go. A common one-day movement is designed to run for 36 to 40 hours, close to the forty hours Cochlaeus marvelled at. The fusee lasted in clocks and watches into the twentieth century. Most watches now do without it, because their regulator, the balance with its balance spring, is far less sensitive to how hard it is pushed than the bare swinging bar of Henlein's day.

It has not quite gone. In 1994 A. Lange & Söhne of Glashütte put a fusee and chain into a wristwatch for the first time, the Tourbillon Pour le Mérite, its chain made of about 600 links. And the power-reserve indicator on some dials shows the tension left in the mainspring: a modern way of showing how much of that same old problem remains to be wound. The first watches were never eggs. The spring, its fading push and the clever ways round it are still on the wrist.

A frame from the WORN chapter Coil the Spring: on a workbench by a window over Nuremberg, a drum-shaped barrel shows its blue coiled spring, and a chain runs from it to a golden cone, the fusee; below, the power bar is half full and the rate gauge points to even.

A frame from Coil the Spring, chapter 46 of the Grand Tour of Time in WORN.

Chapter 46 · Coil the Spring

Tick, the guide, asks: A clock you can carry needs power without a weight. Where does it hide?

Play this chapter in WORN Get WORN on the App Store

Sources

Germanisches Nationalmuseum, object record WI1265 'Sogenannte Henlein-Uhr'
Germanisches Nationalmuseum, press release 'Der Henlein-Uhrenstreit' (2014)
Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 'The so-called Henlein pocket watch', Google Arts & Culture (2016)
Germanisches Nationalmuseum, provenance record HG 9771 (Burgundy clock)
Walters Art Museum object texts for 58.17, 58.68 and 58.79, via Wikimedia Commons
Baltimore Fishbowl, 'A hidden Baltimore superlative' (2026)
J. G. Doppelmayr, Historische Nachricht von den Nürnbergischen Mathematicis und Künstlern (1730)
Deutsches Wörterbuch, Neubearbeitung: 'eierlein'
EBSCO Research Starters, 'Invention of the Watch'
Science Museum, The Clockmakers' Museum: The Nelthropp Collection
WatchesBySJX on the 1994 Tourbillon Pour le Mérite (2015)
Wikipedia: 'Peter Henlein' (en, de), 'Nuremberg eggs', 'Nürnberger Ei', 'Stackfreed', 'Fusee (horology)', 'Mainspring', 'Standuhr Herzog Philipps des Guten von Burgund'

Dive deeper

MuseumSogenannte Henlein-Uhr (WI1265) · Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg.The museum's record of the so-called Henlein watch, with 31 photographs of case and movement and the full literature list. In German.
EssayThe so-called Henlein pocket watch · Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Google Arts & Culture, 2016.The museum's own short account in English: the forged signature, the scans, and how Henlein became a national hero.
BookDie älteste Taschenuhr der Welt? Der Henlein-Uhrenstreit · Thomas Eser, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 2014.The exhibition book of the 2013 to 2014 study, and the fullest modern account. A free digital copy is published by Heidelberg University Library (arthistoricum.net). In German.
EssayA hidden Baltimore superlative: the oldest watch in the world sits on Charles Street · David Nitkin, Baltimore Fishbowl, 2026.A visit to Melanchthon's watch and its new case at the Walters. Read past its old claim that Henlein invented the mainspring.
BookHistorische Nachricht von den Nürnbergischen Mathematicis und Künstlern · Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr, 1730.The first book to call Henlein the inventor of the watch, and an early home of the 'little eggs'. See page 286. In German, in Fraktur.
BookHistory of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders · Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, 1996.A careful history of how clocks and watches spread, with a sober section on Henlein and Nuremberg.
EssayThe Verdict: the original 1994 Tourbillon Pour le Mérite · WatchesBySJX, 2015.The modern wristwatch that brought back the fusee and chain, examined closely.
On this tourSalisbury, Paris, GlashütteA weight-driven tower clock before the spring; the balance spring that made watches keep time; the town where the fusee came back.