Waltham

The company grew out of the venture Edward Howard and Aaron Dennison began in 1849–50 in the Howard & Davis clock factory at Roxbury.^1, 2, 3

Its early names are given differently: Abbott’s history of 1888 gives American Horologe Company, then Warren Manufacturing Company, then Boston Watch Company, while Wikipedia’s accounts date the Boston name to 1853 or 1854.^2, 5, 6

It moved to Waltham in 1854, with about ninety workers at the start; Abbott gives about five watches a day, Wikipedia thirty a week.^4, 5, 6

Waltham’s makers redesigned the watch so that its movement could be built from interchangeable parts made on special machines, and measured every part against a model and a set of master gauges.¹

The watches of 1852–53 were large eight-day watches, followed by a simpler design with one going barrel; a batch of nine hundred sold for $40 each, cased, half the price of a comparable imported movement.¹

The Library of Congress survey calls it the first civilian industry to use interchangeable parts, and says it spurred many other watch and watch-tool firms around Waltham.⁴

In 1857 the company failed. Abbott says Royal E. Robbins bid $56,500 for the works; Wikipedia gives a sheriff’s auction after foreclosure and $56,000.^5, 6

Contemporary prints name it the American Watch Company, and in 1885 it became the American Waltham Watch Company.^5, 6, 10

At the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876 it showed automatic screw-making machinery and the official list of awards named it for its watches, its machinery and “a system of watch-making”; and Jacques David’s report on American watchmaking for the Swiss described the making of a watch step by step, probably largely from what he saw at Waltham.^{5, 6, 11, 12, 13}

Wikipedia’s account says demand rose in the Civil War, when its $13 William Ellery model sold well, and that afterwards Waltham became a main supplier of railroad watches; a jeweller’s card names its Vanguard, Crescent Street and Riverside models as standards for railroad service.^5, 14

According to Wikipedia’s account, it made time fuses, speedometers and other instruments in the First World War; creditors took control in 1921; the company went bankrupt in 1949 and the factory closed on 3 February 1950, putting 1,200 people out of work; and in 1957 it became Waltham Precision Instruments, the Waltham name passing to other firms for watches.⁵

Wikipedia’s account puts its lifetime output at about 40 million watches, clocks and instruments, and records that its nineteenth-century buildings are preserved as the American Waltham Watch Company Historic District.⁵