Stop 86 of 109 · Hands on the Controls
1904 · Paris, Belle Époque
The Watch a Pilot Needed Both Hands To Avoid
Cartier says it built the first men's wristwatch for a daredevil aviator in 1904, though no one has ever found the watch, or proof it existed that early.
In October 1901, the Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont flew his airship around the Eiffel Tower and back to Saint-Cloud in just under thirty minutes, narrowly winning a prize that required exactly that. Steering an airship left him no spare hand to fish a pocket watch out of his coat and check the time.
According to Cartier's own account, Santos-Dumont complained about this to his friend Louis Cartier, who in 1904 made him a watch designed to be worn on the wrist and read at a glance, controls in hand. It's a good story, and Cartier still tells it. But nothing from 1904 survives to confirm it (no sketch, photograph, or newspaper mention), and the earliest Santos-Dumont watches actually on record were sold by Cartier in Paris in 1911.
Whether it counts as the first men's wristwatch is also genuinely unsettled. Army officers had been wearing "wristlets" since at least the 1880s, and a British firm had patented and sold watches designed for the wrist through the 1890s. Santos-Dumont's fame, more than his timing, is likely what made the watch memorable.
What's not in doubt is the practical logic behind it. Pilots, like soldiers who would adopt wristwatches in large numbers a decade later, needed to check the time without letting go of anything, a small, ordinary need that helped move the watch permanently from the pocket to the wrist.