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Why Is It Called a Stopwatch?

No definitive reason exists for why a stopwatch is so called. It could just as easily be called a startwatch. In fact, it was called that in the early days of its existence. The most logical reason for emphasizing the "stop" in a watch that can be both started and stopped is that it is the "stop" that is the part in which people are really interested.

Stopwatch

When using a stopwatch, a person wants to know how long something takes, with some degree of accuracy. Starting the watch is easy enough. For that matter, stopping the watch is easy enough as well. Both actions routinely require nothing than the action of a finger or thumb (or, in some cases, a machine). But the "stop" action is what interests the person taking part in whatever action is being timed.

Stopwatches are used to track the duration of all manner of activities: sporting events, agricultural activities, scuba diving, cooking food, tracking bodily rhythms, and flying a plane are just a few. In a sporting event, each individual may have his or her own stopwatch, but it is the official race clock (sometimes called a stopclock) that is the "version of the truth" that matters as far as each participant's individual finish time.

In the sporting vein, some stopwatches track time by not only hours, minutes, and seconds, but also tenths of a second and even hundredths of a second. Especially in sporting events in which photo finishes are not uncommon, such further delineation of an exact time can be instrumental in who finishes first, second, third, etc.

Another name for a stopwatch is a chronograph (from the Greek words chronos?'time– and graph–time.–and it is here that the history of the device can be told. The first chronograph is thought to date to the 19th Century, to the efforts of a Frenchman named Louis Moinet, who invented a compteur de tierces, which translates roughly into English as "third-party counter." That suggests the idea that the person doing the activity and the person doing the timing are not the same person.

Stopwatch prototype

Moinet was a painter and sculptor of some renown, but his real passion was watchmaking. He studied with some famous Swiss matchmakers and made clocks for famous people, including King George IV of England, Napoleon Bonaparte, Tsar Alexander I of Russia, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe.

Moinet developed his stopwatch prototype in 1815; he envisioned it as something for measuring astronomical events. His device was extremely accurate. It could measure time intervals of 1/60th of a second. It had a button at 12 o'clock to start and stop and another button at 11 o'clock to reset.

Moinet blazed the trail, but his invention wasn't all that well-known and other manufacturers took up the mantle and progress meant that they eventually surpassed the potential of Moinet's device. Another much more well-known chronograph inventor was another Frenchman, Nicolas Mathieu Rieussec, who created a a stopwatch for King Louis XVIII so he could time the performance of his favorite racehorses.

Digital stopwatch

The first wrist chronograph came out in 1913. The first digital stopwatch came out in 1972.

Nowadays, stopwatches (or their equivalents) are everywhere: on people's wrists, on smartphones and tablets, in doctor's offices, and in many more places.

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David White