How did watches evolve?

I was reading an article on how humans and other animals evolved from their primeval ancestors. As you probably know, unless you think some god or gods just decided one fine day to create humans for some strange reason, it was by a process of natural selection!

And I wondered, just to see where the thought would take me, if there were other things that evolved through a process of natural selection. Such as watches!

Do you doubt that? Would you argue that the theory of natural selection only applies to living creatures? If so, consider this little narrative:

Many people walked into a watch shop (at different times, of course), and looked around. They studied the round watch. They examined the rectangular watch. They scrutinized the octagonal watch. They squinted at the little oval watch.

Some people pointed at a rectangular watch and asked the shop assistant, ‘What’s different about this watch?’

And the shop assistant glanced at the watch, checked its dial, then checked its back, and cried, ‘Well, it’s rectangular!’

The customers pointed at an octagonal watch and asked the shop assistant, ‘What’s different about this watch?’

And the shop assistant examined the watch from this side and that and exclaimed, ‘Oh, it’s octagonal!’

And there was a similar response to questions about round watches. And oval ones. I don’t know if that brought any kind of enlightenment to the customers. But they did nod their heads as if they’d got the point.

There might have been a rare customer who might have asked if the shop didn’t have a triangular watch, but that would really be a rare case. And what could the tired shop assistant say except that it was triangular?

Anyway, at the end of the examination of the watches in the display cases and handling a few pieces to see how light or heavy they were or how they looked on their wrists, customers would select one of the various shapes and walk out with the watch in a pretty shop bag or strapped around their wrists. 

And over the years many more millions of customers must have walked out of that shop and thousands of other shops like it, after having purchased round watches or rectangular or octagonal ones, though it would have been observed that some women chose little oval ones for their wrists.

So that’s how watch shops decided to keep more round watches in their showcases than watches of any other shape. And that’s how watch designs began to get standardized. By a process of natural selection.

I guess!

P.S.: There was a brief period when we saw many squarish or rectangularish watches in the shops. And there was a steep rise in the sale of such watches as the first batches of electronic watches, such as Casio and Seiko broke into the market. 

Today everyone uses electronic watches, powered by tiny batteries. There are several solar-powered watches too. But most electronic watches today seem to have gravitated towards the round shape. 

Maybe it’s got to do with the phrase ‘round the clock’! I mean, how can you do something round the clock with a square watch on your wrist?