In every field there are things that everyone takes for granted – usually because of their ubiquity, or because they’ve been around forever, or both. In watchmaking, there are a lot of these, thanks to how long watchmaking has been around, and also thanks to its fundamentally incremental nature. Spring bars are a good example; certain aspects of movement decoration are another. Of the latter, there might be nothing more ubiquitous than Geneva stripes, or waves, or, to give them their proper name, Côtes de Genève. They can be seen, executed to varying degrees of fineness, in watches at just about every price point imaginable, but when were they first…