stopwatch revolutionized swimming, The

Swimming Technique, Apr-Jun 2000 by Colwin, Cecil

The first swimming races bore no resemblance to modern swim meets in which eight swimmers, each in an assigned lane, compete over a set distance in a measured course, at the end of which their times and placings, electronically recorded, are displayed on a large board at the end of the pool.

The early 19th century saw a new type of sporting encounter in which two skilled swimmers would compete for money in a staged challenge match. These match races, usually swum in the sea, a canal or a river, marked the beginnings of the modern sport of competitive swimming.

In a manner similar to the prize-fighting ring, the swimmers competed for a champion's belt and a money purse collected by spectators who placed large bets and wagers on the outcome.

The people involved with these match races were colorful, but not always the most savory members of society. Many of the swimmers, and those who bet on them, were well-known "regulars" at the horse racing tracks and prize-fighting rings. It was not unknown for a match race to be "fixed" or "roped" in collaboration with accomplices who made large wagers on the race.

Before the stopwatch was invented, this problem was compounded by the fact that the more honest promoters often had to arrange matches between swimmers without accurate knowledge of their respective speeds. Much of the matchmaking was made by studying individual form, a process which inevitably involved a mixture of guesswork as well as sheer intuition. This risky approach often resulted in financial loss through gross mismatching of contestants.

Then someone hit on the bright idea of timing prospective swimming contestants with a "horse timer." The invention of this device had been prompted by the feats of a particular horse, by the name of Lexington, and was first marketed in 1859 by the American Watch Company of Waltham, Mass.

Originally known as a chronodrometer, it is likely that the instrument was first noticed at a horse race by one of the early promoters of professional swimming.

The Advent of the Stopwatch

The stopwatch was to competitive swimming what the wheel was to civilization. Greater emphasis could now be placed on speed and not only who placed first, second or third.

The efficiency of the evolving speed strokes--overarm sidestroke, trudgen and, later, the crawl stroke-could now be tested more accurately and scientifically. An additional benefit was the ability to compare performances recorded in different towns and even countries, provided that they were recorded over the same distances and in the same sized pools.

Before the invention of the stopwatch, a type of pocket watch was first used to discover how long it took to perform some action. Sometimes they were called chronographs but, since this implied a written record of the time, the term was not correct.

The first stopwatches had a lever which literally stopped the watch by interfering with the train. This was obviously a very unsatisfactory method for obtaining elapsed time since the starting time was arbitrary, and stopping the watch caused it to malfunction as a timepiece.

To overcome this problem, some watches used two trains: one for the conventional timepiece, and one which could be stopped and started at will and which drove a separate seconds hand. However, the hand sometimes moved in one-second jumps, so timing was not precise to a fraction of a second.

This type of watch was an improvement, but still lacked two other vital ingredients of the modem concept of a stopwatch-the ability to count elapsed times of greater duration than a minute, which necessitated a minute counter to be successful, and the convenience of starting the counting hand from zero each time to avoid the need for arithmetic. This necessitated a reset device. Both of these two functions were finally achieved in the mid19th century.

An affordable stopwatch for timing sporting events only became generally available in the late 1850s. However, the sweephand was not of the "flyback" type that we know today, and it had to be continually reset.

In the 1860s, Swiss watch makers successfully tackled the problem and succeeded in making cheaper watches. Only several hundred chronodrometers were made, and the total output of English and Continental makers of these timers was not large until the 1870s, when the Swiss figured out how to make a workable chronograph-- with a fly-back seconds hand-for the middle part of the market.

According to records, the first amateur swimming race to be timed was the English 1-mile championship of 1869, swum in the River Thames from Putney Aquaduct to Hammersmith Bridge. The winner of that event, T Morris, became the first amateur champion ever to be timed (27 minutes 18 seconds).

Official lists of records were soon published. The first official swimming record belonged to Winston Cole, who in 1871 swam 100 yards in 1 minute 15 seconds, this time being ratified by the recently formed Metropolitan Swimming Club Association.

Handicap Races

Later, with the advent of swimming pools of measured length, handicap races were much in vogue and very popular in the 19th century. This form of competition was based upon the need to even out the competition, while also giving slower swimmers an opportunity to excel.