(2) Travel Alarm Clocks. One round with a plastic back made in Japan, one square with a leather case made in Germany. 

Condition: Commensurate with use. We cannot guarantee the working condition of any timepiece. 

Largest Size: 3 1/2 x 3 1/2 x 3 1/2 in. 

Watches, for most of history, were luxury items. Much of the population’s sleep ended when it got light, or the rooster crowed. In many cultures a night watchman awakened the few who had to rise before dawn. However, watches with an alarm function first began to appear in great numbers in the 14th Century, as specified in Dante’s Divine Comedy (1320) which describes a clock equipped with a bell mechanism. There are descriptions of water clocks as well as monastic bell signals using similarly timed principles in antiquity, but the oldest surviving alarm clocks are a handful of wall clocks that signaled tower guards to ring the church bells dating from the mid 15th Century in Germany and Italy. With the invention of the flywheel and the spring as an energy reservoir, alarm clocks, including an alarm function, became portable, but they did not become accessible to the general populace until the early 18th Century, when the “carriage clock” first appeared. A travel clock (also known as a travel alarm clock and in some cases a pouch alarm clock) is an alarm clock whose primary characteristic is that it must have a size, design, and weight that make it easily transportable during a trip, so it is usually contained in a box or case. In the case of an alarm clock, the box must be constructed to let the acoustic signal pass through to wake up the owner at the set time. As the Industrial Era began, more efficient and affordable clocks as well as hand and pocket watches were developed to help employees arrive at their work on time. Some manufacturers, often forming cottage industries like in the Black Forest region, began to create highly artistic yet functional clocks specifically for home use, but the first major manufacturers of mass produced travel clocks appeared in Austria and Switzerland in the mid 19th Century, soon expanding to the rest of the world. At the beginning of the 20th Century the travel clock became more and more streamlined, and although it continued to find use thanks to railroads and automobiles it was rapidly replaced for general timekeeping by the wristwatch. The quartz revolution and clock radio technology led travel clocks to evolve once more, and today they are often considered more ornamental, decorative, or as collectibles, since modern cell phones and smartphones have built in clocks and alarm systems and are ubiquitous around the globe, carried throughout the day.

Commensurate with use. We cannot guarantee the working condition of any timepiece.