If you have ever received a speeding ticket, you can thank the watch industry: It has played a leading role in measuring how fast a car can go and how fast it shouldn’t.

That connection began with the invention of the chronograph, essentially a stopwatch. In 1816, the French watchmaker Louis Moinet made the first chronograph, the combination of a watch that kept time and an independent second hand that could be stopped manually, measuring to 1/60th of a second. (He also was an astronomer and used his invention to make astronomical observations.)

In 1821 Nicolas Rieussec, one of the king’s watchmakers, created an iteration that would place an ink dot on the dial to record a time. When he wanted to present it to the French Academy of Sciences, it needed a name — so he turned to the Greek language, combining its word for time, chronos, with the word for writing, graph. Examples of such chronographs are in the collections of the British Museum in London and the Patek Philippe Museum in Geneva.

The chronograph eventually made a leap from measuring the speed of horses to that of automobiles, but not before trains and tractors had their turn. “Numerical speed limits restricting the velocity of trains appeared in Britain as early as 1861,” said Miranda Marraccini, the librarian at the Horological Society of New York.

And in roughly the same period, according to Tim Mosso, a watch specialist at the 1916 Company, formerly known as WatchBox, Parliament also passed laws restricting the speed of early steam-powered tractors.