Watch houses, eager to bring attention to their history, are organizing their own museum exhibitions and in turn giving their brands extra panache.

The need to reinvent watchmaking for the digital age has brought esoteric arts like miniature painting and micro-mosaic work back from the brink of extinction, placing them on equal footing with mechanical innovations.

There is a growing convergence between jewelry and watchmaking, a phenomenon that is elevating the previously unsung work of the stone-setter to new heights.

Luxury brands, their marketers and designers know that it is first and foremost the dial that draws the buyer in. And the hour markers are the key style component.

The competition for these antique pieces is a reflection of the rising purchasing power of Turkish buyers.

Van Cleef & Arpels revives a men's model first designed in 1949 and commercialized in the 1970s.

The dress watch du jour has a band skinny as a bracelet and a dainty face that says there's no excuse for being fashionably late.

Watchmakers are giving major consideration to calendar features on their watches for 2012; Cartier Rotonde incorporates an annual calendar on a round face with layered discs indicating the day of the week and month with red markers. Photo

Casio's G-Shock GB6900 watch uses a new, low-power Bluetooth chip called Bluetooth Smart (or Bluetooth 4.0) to do amazing things with a PC or smartphone. Butt the watch doesn't work unless your phone also has Bluetooth 4.0 - and right now, only a couple of them do.

With no consensus, international delegates postponed for three years a decision on whether to eliminate leap seconds, which help keep the world’s atomic clocks synchronized with Earth’s rotation.

The United States wants to scrap the leap second, but beware: without it, noon will strike at sunrise thousands of years from now.

Seven hundred delegates from about 70 nations attending United Nations telecommunications agency meeting will decide whether to abolish the leap second, which is added on once every few years to synchronize atomic clocks; United States wants to scrap the leap second, but others defend it, saying in past 40 years of adding them there have been no problems with electronic systems.

Dimitrie Vicovanu, like a specialized surgeon, goes into the inner worlds of wristwatches, restoring the old and nonticking to near perfection.

When it comes to luxury watches, as many gift recipients will discover this Christmas morning, sizes are nearing the Big Ben range.

Discrepancies in recording distances and pace can be frustrating for those training for races.