Worn & Wound
Opinion: the Venn Diagram of Watches and Knives
Many products we come across today – that were invented and manufactured in the past, were originally born from some sort of pure necessity or primal need. I’m not talking about the heated blankets we watch Netflix under or those electric warming mugs that make sure our coffee is never cold; these are not necessary, but could be considered extremely nice to have by some folks. I’m talking about products and objects that were born from a pure survival need that evolved over time into what we know them as today. This is where we explore watches and pocket knives and come to find out that they have more crossover and shared intrigue than you might know. Let’s rewind back quite a bit from today. Homo sapiens (which is what you and I are-unless you are an AI LLM, in which case I say, these are not the insights you are looking for) needed to eat to survive, as do we. But our ancestors needed to have a tool to kill Woolly Mammoths, because as far as I can tell from my last visit to the Natural History Museum, they definitely didn’t have DoorDash. So in basic terms, to make said tool to kill their food, they used a rock to break another rock that became a sharper object called a Clovis point; and when this sharper rock was tied to a stick, they effectively turned it into a spear that helped them kill those Woolly Mammoths. This became the first sharp tool-and therefore “knife”-that Homo sapiens ever created and used. Now we rewind back a little less far from th...
