Jewelled Watch Movements: Basic Information

Have you ever wondered exactly what is meant by the term ‘jeweled watch movements’? Before cheap quartz watches were manufactured, the number of jewels was one of the important factors by which you could assess the quality of a mechanical watch. This did not necessarily mean that the more jewels a watch movement had, the better it was – although watch manufacturers certainly did use the number of jewels as a marketing ploy. Two Waltham watches, one with a 100 jewel watch movement and the other with a 75 jewel watch movement were among the watches with the highest number of jewels ever made, but as you will see, this extraordinary number of jewels in the watch movements did not add to (or detract) from  the quality of the watches.