This month brought strange echoes of that history. In China, where the newly released Apple Watch is quickly becoming a controversial, in-demand status symbol, the authorities reportedly banned the device. “The use of wearables with Internet access, location information, and voice-calling functions should be considered a violation of national security regulations when used by military personnel,” a Chinese military newspaper quoted a government agency as declaring, in apparent reference to gadgets like the Apple Watch. A technology conceived in war had become too technologically sophisticated for soldiers.

It was a reminder that advances in time-telling technology aren’t exclusively about finding a better way to tell time. They’re often about something else, too, even if that something else influences the perception of time itself. Over the past century or so, people have kept time mainly in their pockets, then on their wrists, and now back in their pockets. If the Apple Watch and similar smartwatches succeed, the wrist could experience a resurgence.

Alexis McCrossen, a history professor at Southern Methodist University and the author of Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life, traces the story of the wristwatch back to the spread of “portable clocks,” or large pocket watches, in the 1700s, when “people want to start carrying the time around with them; they’re not content just to look at the public clocks in whatever village or town they might end up in.” These watches were made progressively smaller and better-secured with features like chains or straps, and were often seen primarily not as a timepiece but as a reliable vehicle for investing personal savings. “If you look at pawn records from the 19th century in the U.S., about 40 to 50 percent of all pawned items were pocket watches,” McCrossen told me.

Innovations in the mid- to late-19th century—including the machine manufacturing of watches, the advent of the railroad, factories, and electricity, and the standardization of time zones in Europe and the United States— increased demand around the world for watches and the “imperatives to own and control time” rather than obey it, she said.

These trends cascaded to warfare; during the Second Boer War in South Africa between 1899 and 1902, soldiers “jerry-rigged pocket watches and strapped them on their wrists” since it was now possible to precisely synchronize military movements, McCrossen explained. Wearing a bracelet with a watch on it had flitted in and out of female fashion in the 18th and 19th centuries, but the Boer War hinted that men could follow suit. Watchmakers operating in an increasingly competitive marketplace took note of the subtle shift in social conventions. One vendor in England advertised that the “wristlet watch” had been used at the legendary Battle of Omdurman in Sudan in 1898 and again during the Boer War, pointing out that “desert-experience is the severest test a watch can have.” The implicit message was a notable one in a period of more precise time: A wristwatch’s reliability, rather than its aesthetics, was what mattered most.

The wristwatch nevertheless remained largely a woman’s accoutrement, though one whose universal utility presaged broader popularity. “The wrist watch ... is now the fashion of the hour,” The New York Times breathlessly reported from Paris in 1912. “It is worn over here by women who have to work as well as those who play.” Not only that, but “it is the most useful piece of jewelry that has been invented for many decades. … The watch hidden away in the belt, or turned face downward on the bust, or swinging loose from a chatelaine pin, was an ornament but not always a help. As it was usually under one’s furs or topcoat in Winter, it was better to guess the time than to try to prove it.”