Digital Chess Clock
An electronic clock that tracks each player's remaining time and can apply increments or delays.
Digital clocks replaced older analog chess clocks because they can implement modern time controls such as increments, delays, and multi-stage time limits that mechanical clocks cannot handle.
Etymology
Digital here contrasts with the analogue dial-and-flag mechanical clocks that preceded it: mechanical chess clocks were invented by Thomas Bright Wilson of the Manchester Chess Club and first used at the London tournament of 1883. The first digital chess clock was created in 1973 by Bruce Cheney, then an electrical engineering undergraduate at Cornell University, as a course project, built from TTL NAND gates with red LED displays and powered from the mains. The first commercially available digital chess clock was patented in 1975 by Joseph Meshi and Jeffrey R. Ponsor and named the Micromate-80; the improved Micromate-180 followed three years later under US Patent 4,247,925, alongside Meshi's San Diego State University MBA thesis Demand Analysis for a New Product (The Digital Chess Clock). Digital clocks made the delay and increment systems practical: Bobby Fischer filed a patent for an increment clock in 1988, awarded in 1989, first used in the 1992 Fischer-Spassky match, and a simple-delay patent application was filed on 10 March 1994 by Frank A. Camaratta Jr. and William Goichberg, issuing as US Patent 5,420,830 on 10 May 1995 and assigned to the USCF.
First documented: 1973 — Bruce Cheney's Cornell University electrical engineering course project (1973), the first digital chess clock; first commercial model the Micromate-80, patented 1975 by Joseph Meshi and Jeffrey R. Ponsor
Translations
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