Like any mechanical object, there needs to be some kind of energy powering the product.  With a watch, this power is provided by winding the watch with your fingers.  Everyone knows that it is necessary to wind a watch tightly, but the physical mechanics of this escapes most people.

What you are turning with the crown is the mainspring, which is a narrow and long spring that ultimately makes all the other components in the watch move.  Springs are great for storing potential energy, which is just one of many types of energy that exists in the universe.  Since the spring is so small, just a little bit of effort from your fingers results in a lot of potential energy, and not much of it is needed to power the small gears inside a watch.  If one were to wind a watch fifty times bigger than themselves, it could take hours or days to wind it completely.

The mainspring is stored inside of a small container that functions as the first gear in a series of gear.  It meshes with another small gear and turns that, which in turn causes another gear to move, and so on.  This is the basic principle of a watch or any geared mechanism works.

As you know, it only takes a few winds for a watch to last weeks or months.  If there were no further system of control, the energy would immediately be converted to kinetic energy, and the gears would spin too quickly, and the practicality of keeping time would be lost.  Therefore, there needs to be something that controls the rate of spinning, and to such a degree that the rate is even, controlled, and matches what we humans have designated to be seconds, minutes, and hours.  This part of watchmaking is more complicated than previous segments, but those who are trained in this art have no problem understanding and applying these principles.

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