So you can know the time.
Importance of watches?
If you don't keep watch how are you gonna know if the bad guys are coming?
If you're clever enough you can turn a watch into a work of art. Rembrandt did it with The Night Watch.
Of course, if you mean those time thingies you wear on your wrist, you might be surprised to learn that the first wristwatch in history belonged to Alexander the Great.
Some years ago the Scientific American published an article under the heading "There is nothing new under the sun" in which they revealed that Alexander had the first wrist watch in history.
It wasn't like a modern digital watch, or even one of those wind-up jobs with springs and winders and big and little hands sweeping around a numbered dial. It was a simple piece of cloth that his alchemists had soaked in photo-sensitive chemicals. He tied it around his wrist and its colour varied according to the amount of sunlight it received during the day, allowing him to know the approximate time.
It was called Alexander's rag time-band.
But the French (who sometimes fail to understand American humour) published an expanded version of the story and quoted the original spoof in Scientific American as source material.
