Evolution of Chess Clocks and Increment

According to Wikipedia "A chess clock is a device that comprises two adjacent clocks with buttons to stop one clock while starting the other, so that the two clocks never run simultaneously. The clocks are used in games where the time is allocated between two parties. The purpose is to keep track of the total time each party takes and prevent delays. Parties may take more or less time over any individual move".

This year's Global Chess League brought the time format of No-increment which is rare at the top level tournaments. GM Alireza Firouzja's Triveni Continental Kings have retained their Tech Mahindra Global Chess League title after defeating GM Anish Giri's PBG Alaskan Knights 2-0 in the final.


With no-increment in the clock, the seventeenth piece in the battle was the clock. It brought a lot of chaos and mixed opinions. But it begged the question about the old rules and how the chess clocks have been used in the past and if the time-control will bring more attraction and players to the game of chess. 

Time in a Bottle Literally 
The song title by Jim Croce is the first idea someone used to end the boring waiting for their opponent to move. In the early 1800s, competitive chess was a time commitment, with games lasting 8-10 hours. Players would often try to stall and exhaust each other. One infamous match between Howard Staunton and Pierre St. Amant in 1843 reportedly took over 14 hours!
The sandglasses were first used in 1860 in chess match in London.

The use of them had to be abandoned due to accuracy issues, temperature changes and humidity effecting the drainage of the sand. 

Analog Chess Clocks
The first use of chess clock dates back to 1883 in a strong tournament held in London. 

The tournament was also notable for the first use of the double-sided chess clock, invented  Thomas Bright Wilson of Manchester Chess Club and Joseph Henry Blackburne who created the first chess clock in response to the demand for a new modification. It was manufactured under the name Fattorini & Sons of Bradford with some great marketing. 

The player who was unable to complete the game within the allotted 15 moves per hour was eliminated. The verdict was shocking to the nineteenth-century chess community, despite the fact that it may appear insignificant today. The world title match between Steinitz and Lasker, which was held in New York, also included the new timepieces.

The Dutch Chess Federation's Secretary General, H.D.B. Meijer, unveiled the renowned "flag" six years later, in 1889. The player is informed by the flag that he has just three minutes left before the timer goes off. The flag wasn't installed on every chess clock for another 20 years.

Ding Liren froze and failed to make the allocated 40 moves in Game 7 of the 2023 World Chess Championship

Funnily enough the player's journal of the 1883 Tournament has no little mention on this topic about clocks but the chess parties and journals are fun read. You can find it here. 

Digital Clocks
Bruce Cheney, a Cornell University student, created the first digital clock in 1973. More advanced time controls were possible with the digital clock than with the analog one, although it had its share of problems like any prototype. The Micromate-80, the first digital clock to be sold commercially, was developed in 1975 by Jeffrey Ponsor and Joseph Mashi. An upgraded clock, known as the Micromate-180, was created three years later, in 1978. 

Ben Bulsink, who was then a student at the Technical University Twente in Enschede, the Netherlands, constructed the first DGT clock in the middle of the 1980s(1985 to be exact). The Dutch Chess Federation journal praised the clock and referred to it as "the perfect chess clock." One issue, though, was that the clock was handmade and far too costly to make. Bulsink went back to work at the University, and only about 60 of these clocks were ever produced.

Bobby Fischer & Increment
Abstract from the Patent Submitted by Fischer:- A game timing apparatus and method for simultaneously timing events for two players is disclosed. The method involves presetting a pair of clocks for respective initial time periods, starting one of the clocks to time a first player's move, simultaneously stopping one clock and starting the other, and incrementing or decrementing each of the clocks by a time interval once for each move or a group of moves. The apparatus includes a pair of clock means, a pair of start switches for starting and stopping the clock means, and a compensation means for incrementing or decrementing each clock means by a time interval. 

Fischer's digital clock gave each player a fixed period of time at the start of the game and then added a small amount after each move. Joseph Meshi called this "Accumulation" as it was a main feature of his patented Micromate-180 (US Patent 4,247,925 1978). This became the linchpin of Fischer's clock patented ten years later. In this way, the players would never be desperately short of time. This timing method is occasionally called "accumulation" but it is usually called "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, being subsequently used in the FIDE World Chess Championship 1998.

On March 10, 1994, a patent application was filed by inventors Frank A. Camaratta Jr. of Huntsville, Alabama, and William Goichberg of Salisbury Mills, New York, for a game timer especially suitable for playing the game of chess, which employed a (simple) "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. United States Patent 5,420,830 was issued on May 10, 1995, and subsequently assigned to the United States Chess Federation by the inventors. As with the Fischer clock, the benefit of the delay clock is to reduce the likelihood that a player with positional or material superiority will lose a match solely because of the expiration of time on that player's time clock.

The Digital Transmissions
DGT took up the challenge when the International Chess Federation (FIDE) stated that they would like to use electronic boards at the 1998 Chess Olympiad in Elista. They set out to create a system of about 300 electronic boards connected to a single network in order to gather all the data for live online presentation and the game scores for the daily bulletin that was printed. It proved challenging to accomplish this goal, and numerous technical issues needed to be resolved between the development paper and the final product. However, 328 DGT e-Boards were operational by the beginning of the Olympiad, and the DGT-developed system operated without a hitch.

You can check this link for more trivia for 33rd Chess Olympiad.

The introduction of Fischer’s increment time control addressed the issue of players running out of time completely, revolutionizing the way games are played. But I wonder if No-increment time control will be the fan favorite especially it giving us moments like this.

But as chess player and arbiter myself I think increment is much better. The chess moves should dictate the result rather than old saying "If you snooze, you loose".