America industrializes the watch

In the decades before 1850 the United States imported most of its watches, chiefly from England and Switzerland; the Smithsonian puts imports between 1825 and 1858 at about $46 million.¹

Before the 1850s probably no more than about two thousand watches had been made in the country. There had been attempts: the Pitkin brothers of Hartford, Connecticut, finished a movement in 1838 and made some 800 to 900 watches by 1845.^1, 4, 7

The venture that became the Waltham company began in 1849–50 in a corner of the Howard & Davis clock factory in Roxbury, near Boston, where Edward Howard and Aaron Lufkin Dennison worked on new watch designs and the machines to make them. The money came from Howard’s father-in-law, the Boston mirror maker Samuel Curtis.^1, 2, 3

Dennison had seen firearms made with interchangeable parts at the Springfield Armory, and the watch firm borrowed the armory’s tight organisation, its machine shop and its reliance on models and gauges. That is the method this site calls interchangeable parts.^1, 4

The Smithsonian describes the Waltham makers as developing the world’s first machine-made watches in the 1850s; Abbott’s history of 1888 gives that title, for America, to the Pitkins’ watch of 1838.^1, 7

The opening batch of seventeen watches, finished late in 1852, was still largely made by hand. The design was then simplified, to one mainspring in a going barrel without the fusee and chain of English watches, and a later batch of nine hundred sold for $40 each, cased, about half the price of an imported movement of the same quality.¹

In 1854 the company moved to a new factory at Waltham, Massachusetts; the Library of Congress survey says it went there to escape the dust and vibration that harmed precision work. In 1857 it failed, and Royal E. Robbins bought the Waltham works, under whom it carried on as the American Watch Company and later the American Waltham Watch Company.^{3, 5, 7, 33, 34}

Interchangeability was never complete. Jacques David, who studied the American factories in 1876, found that they still treated jewels and pivots as unique and kept a record of each movement so they could supply an exact replacement part, according to Richard Watkins’s account of his report.⁸

The NAWCC says the cost of an American jewelled watch fell from about $40 in 1850 to about $10 by 1880.¹⁰

According to Wikipedia’s account of the American system, the know-how spread from Waltham to Elgin and on to dozens of other makers, and labour was still about 80 per cent of the cost of a watch in 1910.⁴

Elgin, Illinois, became Waltham’s great western rival. The company was incorporated in Chicago in 1864 as the National Watch Company, built its factory at Elgin, and delivered its opening movement, the B. W. Raymond, in 1867.^7, 32

At the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, from May to November 1876, Waltham showed automatic screw-making machinery and the official list of awards names the American Watch Company for its watches, its watch-making machinery and “a system of watch-making”.^{5, 6, 7, 35}

The Swiss were shaken. Watkins records that their delegate Theodore Gribi wrote that they had been left behind by their New World competitors, and that the Intercantonal Society of Jura Industries sent the Longines engineer Jacques David to study the American factories, which he toured with Gribi from mid-August to November 1876.⁸

David’s long confidential report, presented on 22 January 1877, warned that Swiss watchmaking would be destroyed by American exports unless it adopted American methods, and set out ten recommendations. It was kept from the press and circulated in a few manuscript copies; Longines published a facsimile in 1992.^8, 9

Edouard Favre-Perret, a member of the Philadelphia jury for pocket watches, wrote his own report on the exhibition for the Swiss Federal Council, published in 1877. The Swiss response is part of the story of the Jura arc.^8, 37

Railroads made precise time a matter of safety. On 18 November 1883 the railroads of the United States and Canada changed to standard time zones, the change told under railroad time.^{13, 14, 15}

Railroads also set rules for the watches their crews carried. After a collision at Kipton, Ohio, in April 1891, the Cleveland jeweller Webb C. Ball became the railroad’s chief time inspector.^{16, 17, 18, 39}

Railroad grade became a selling point. A 1921 advertisement calls Hamilton the railroad timekeeper of America, and a jeweller’s card names Waltham’s Vanguard, Crescent Street and Riverside as standards for railroad service.^{19, 40, 41}

At the other end of the market, the Waterbury Watch Company could sell its long-wind watch for $3.50 by 1880.^{7, 10, 23}

In 1896 the Ingersoll brothers’ Yankee, made for them by the Waterbury Clock Company, sold for one dollar; Wikipedia calls it the first watch priced at a dollar, and an Ingersoll advertisement of 1903 sells it as the Ingersoll Dollar Watch.^{10, 22, 23, 31}

Wikipedia’s account of Ingersoll says Waterbury was making 8,000 of them a day by 1899.²²

The NAWCC dates the American industry’s decline to after 1910, following the recessions of the 1890s, overproduction and a saturated market, and says the Swiss came back into the American market in the 1920s with machine manufacture, modern marketing and the wristwatch, which American makers had neglected.¹⁰

The big names faded after the Second World War. Waltham’s factory closed in 1950 and the company left watchmaking in 1957, Elgin ended manufacturing in the United States in 1968, and Hamilton moved movement production to Switzerland in 1969.^{5, 19, 25, 32}

Wikipedia’s accounts say machinery from one failed American maker, Dueber-Hampden of Canton, Ohio, was bought by the Soviet trading company Amtorg in 1930 and shipped to Moscow, with 21 of its workers, to equip a state watch factory.^43, 44

Hamilton’s electric watch of 1957, made in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, links this story to the electric and quartz revolution that followed.^{19, 25, 27, 30}