Watches from Perrelet

  Abraham-Louis Perrelet, a Swiss watchmaker, invented a self-winding mechanism in 1770 for pocket watches. It worked on the same principle as a modern wristwatch, and was designed to wind as the owner walked, using an oscillating weight inside the large watch that moved up and down.
The Geneva Society of Arts reported in 1776 that fifteen minutes walking was necessary to wind the watch sufficiently for eight days, and the following year reported that it was selling well.
Perrelet sold some of his watches to a contemporary watch making luminary, Abraham Louis Breguet around 1780 who improved upon the mechanism in his own version of the design, calling his watches "perpetuelles" the French word for perpetual. They did not work reliably and Breguet stopped producing them around 1800.