History of stopwatch clocks

The ancients knew several species of watches. Vitruvius speaks of the water clock or clepsydra, the air, the sun and other species that are unknown.
The Egyptians measured with the water clock movements medium Sun Also worth the illustrious astronomer for observations. Water clocks and sundials were invented in Egypt in the time of the Ptolemies, the hourglasses were later perfected by Scipio Nasica or as others Ctesibius (disciple of Roman orators them measured the length of his speeches.)
It is believed that the great weight and wheel clocks were invented in the West by the Benedictine monk Gerbert (Pope, under the name of Sylvester II, the end of the tenth century) although with some previously known at the Empire bizantino.1 According to other sources, the first watch that speaks of history built on principles of mechanics is that of Richard Wasigford, abbot of St. Albans, who lived in England in 1326, but apparently the invention of Gerbert (afterwards Sylvester II) was not more than a sundial. The second is that he built in Santiago Dondis to Padua in 1344 and which was seen as referring the course of the sun and planets. The third was the one on the Louvre in Paris, brought from Germany sent by King Charles V of Francia.2 The direct ancestor of these instruments may be complex Antikythera mechanism, dated between 150 and 100 a. C.1

Universal time clock, invented by Carlos Alban.
In Spain, the oldest news of the installation of a clock tower dates from 1378, when a document is included in the terms established by the chapter of the cathedral of Valencia and Juan Alemany, master clocks from Germany, for a large sphere clock to locate on the old campanario.3 Within mechanical watches considered the oldest in the country is located the clock "seny de les Hores" that was installed in the cathedral of Barcelona in 1393, the steeple of the church San Miguel de la Villa de Cuéllar (Segovia) that was arranged in the year 13 954 5 and finally another Seville Cathedral in 1396, whose inauguration took place on July 22, 1400 in the presence of King Henry III of Castilla.6
The first pocket watches imagined building was Pedro Bell Nuremberg; appearance earned them the name "Nuremberg eggs." In 1647, Christiaan Huygens applied to tower clocks or wall pendulum, whose discovery is due to Galileo. The same applied physicist in 1665 the spiral spring pocket watches. In 1647, the Genevan Gruet, residing in London, applied to the chain steel watch for transmitting the movement of the drum to the cone, replacing the vihuela strings used before. Two years later he invented repeating watches.

There are a variety of different types of clocks. Currently personal timepieces are mostly mechanical and electronic, either analogue or digital, a small battery powered electrical impulses through the needles rotated (analog clocks) or dial numbers (digital watches).

There are plenty of mechanical watches for personal use (wrist or pocket) or general (clocks and anteroom). Mechanical watches are estimated and valued more than electronic despite their lower accuracy and higher price, as they are considered by experts as mechanical art.
Today there are a lot of watch companies, manufacturers of mechanical watches, both personal and fixed, countries like Germany, Switzerland, Japan, China, United Kingdom, United States and Russia, home to major companies in the sector. In the analog format exists a fixed scale and two needles that rotate at a constant speed, the shorter and wider needle indicates the hours, and it takes  online timer and twelve hours to complete a full turn, the long, thin needle, the minute hand indicates the minutes and takes an hour to complete a lap around the clock. There may be a third wire in the same axis or with a different axis pointing the seconds and takes a minute to make a complete circuit.
In digital watches, there are two groups of two digits each, separated by a colon (:), the first two indicate the time in 24-hour format of 0-23 or 12-hour format of 1-12 and the second group of digits indicating the minutes over a range of 0 to 59, in some cases there may be a third group of two digits indicating the second in a range of 0 to 59 seconds.