The History of the Chess Game Clock
In chess tournaments during the 19th century, players often took excessively long to make moves, resulting in protracted matches. Without any formal time limits in place, this led to all sorts of arguments and frustration among both players and spectators, turning chess into more of a test of endurance than a strategic battle.
The solution came in the form of clocks that could limit the amount of time each player had to move. The first use of a chess clock occurred in 1883 during the London International Tournament. Rather than a single clock, two separate timepieces were used, with an official manually switching them.
The next major innovation came with the invention of the mechanical chess clock, attributed to Thomas Bright Wilson in 1883. This device featured two linked clocks: when one player's clock was running, the other's was stopped, preventing simultaneous time consumption. These analog clocks were equipped with a "flag" that falls to indicate the exact moment the player's time has expired.
The mechanical chess clock, however, came equipped with plenty of drawbacks. They lacked accuracy and matching of the two clocks and matching of the indicators (flags) of time expiration. Additional time could not be easily added due to the complex time controls, preventing certain forms of chess.
To address the issues with analog clocks, in 1973 Cornell University electrical engineering student and chess player Bruce Cheney created the first digital chess clock. The display, however, was done with LEDs that required significant power, and as a result, only one set of digits could be displayed, that of the player whose turn it was to move. Each player had a separate counter, and, in a parallel to the original mechanical architecture, one player's counter was disabled while the other's was running. The clock only had one mode. It could be reset but not set and could not count the number of moves. The first commercially available digital chess clock was patented in 1975 by Joseph Meshi and Jeffrey R. Ponsor. They named it the Micromate-80, and there was only one ever made. Three years later a much-improved Micromate-180 was produced at a larger scale.
With the new wave of digital technology, demand was created for a more reliable and manipulatable chess clock. In 1988, GM Bobby Fischer filed for US patent 4,884,255, outlining a digital clock that gave each player a fixed period of time at the start of the game and then added a small amount after each move. This timing method is often referred to as "accumulation,” "increment," "bonus," or "Fischer.” The increment time control was first used in the privately organized 1992 Fischer–Spassky match and quickly became popular in the wider chess world and was used in the FIDE World Chess Championship 1998. Nowadays, most top-level tournaments use Fischer's system. Other aspects of Fischer's patent, such as a synthesized voice announcing how much time the players have, aiming to eliminate the need for them to keep looking at the clock, however, have not been adopted.
On March 10, 1994, inventors Frank A. Camaratta Jr. and William Goichberg filed for US patent 5,420,830 for a game timer especially suitable for playing the game of chess, which employed a "delay" feature. The game timer provides, among other features, a user-definable delay between the time the activation button is pressed and the time that the activated clock actually begins to count down.
The evolution of the chess clock transformed the game from a test of endurance into a true contest of strategy and skill. Beginning with manual time tracking in the 19th century, the development of mechanical and eventually digital clocks introduced fairness and flexibility. Innovations such as Fischer's increment and the delay feature further refined gameplay, ensuring that modern chess is both dynamic and equitable, transforming it into the game we know and love today.
