Ever notice those little pockets on your jeans? They are pretty much too small to be useful. But in the old times, it had an important purpose: The pocket held a pocket watch. The ubiquity of the pockets can be traced back to the design for "waist overalls," the original name for the blue jeans made by Levi Strauss & Co. They appeared on the design in the patent Strauss and J.W. Davis received for "Improvement in Fastening Pocket Openings," way back on May 20, 1873, and were first put into mass use in 1890 with the "Lot 501" jeans, the model for Levi's 501 jeans today. "The watch pocket was a feature of our first waist overalls," Tracey Panek, the in-house historian at Levi Strauss & Co., told INSIDER in an email. "The oldest pair of waist overalls in the Levi Strauss & Co. Archives [from 1879] includes the watch pocket." Because the small pocket was meant to hold pocket watches, you won't usually find it on suit pants. Suit jackets already have pocket watches, which makes one on the pants superfluous. Levi Strauss himself, for example, kept a pocket watch in the vest of his business suit, according to Panek. Pants with the tiny pocket are called "five-pocket pants," but the tiny pocket isn't actually the fifth one. The fifth pocket is actually on the back-left, added to Levi's 501 jeans in 1901. Pretty much no one today carries around a pocket watch. People tend to check the time on their phones or wristwatches. Panek told INSIDER that the small pockets are kept on Levi's jeans today to maintain the integrity of the original design. Today, there isn't much you can do with the tiny pocket. Some people suggest using them to keep coins or keys, but they tend to dig into your hip. Others recommend them for matches, condoms, and tickets, but those are difficult to extract if your fingers aren't similarly tiny. The pockets are somewhat helpful for carrying small pieces of hand jewelry for a few moments — like if you plan to propose to your significant other, or if someone else is washing his hands and wants you to hold on to his rings — but that's pretty much it. For the most part, it's best to ignore them and think about the pockets as a piece of history that's still with us.