Time Telling through the Ages

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

America Learns to Make Watches

While Eli Terry was sawing wood for his curious clocks back in the early days of the nineteenth century, Luther Goddard, America's first watch-manufacturer, was preaching the Gospel to the town and country-folk in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Between sermons he repaired watches.

Although we can find no record of such a meeting, it is easy to imagine that while plodding along some dusty country road Preacher Goddard met Terry jogging along with his cumbersome wooden clocks hanging from his saddle. The thought may have come to the minister-mechanic that it would be much easier to peddle watches than clocks.

Whatever may have been the prompting, we find, as a matter of record, that, in the year 1809, while Terry was making and peddling his clocks, Luther Goddard set up a small watch-making shop in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, the place of his birth. He employed watch-makers who had learned their trade in England. At that time, there was a law in force which prohibited the importation of foreign-made watches into America and this gave Goddard his chance. But in 1815, when the law was repealed and the American market was quickly flooded with cheaper, if not better watches from abroad, he was forced to retire from the field. During those few years he had produced about five hundred watches.

Discouraged by his venture into worldly affairs, he turned again to his former occupation of preacher and evangelist, and consoled himself with the remark that he "had here a profession high above his secular vocation." In those days, protection and free trade had not yet become the rival rallying cries of two great political parties; otherwise we might have found this early manufacturer entering politics instead of the pulpit. While he is credited with manufacturing the first American watches, however, it is doubtful whether he and his workmen really did more than to assemble imported parts.

More than twenty years now passed before another effort was made to produce watches in America – this time by two brothers – Henry and James F. Pitkin of Hartford, Connecticut. In 1838, they brought out a watch, most of the parts of which were made by machinery, but it proved more or less a failure. After a brief struggle, they gave up in discouragement. Henry Pitkin died in 1845, and his brother, a few years later.

While the Pitkin Brothers were struggling with their problem in Hartford, Jacob D. Custer of Norristown, Pennsylvania, was engaged in a similar task. He succeeded in making a few watches between 1840 and 1845, thus gaining his niche in history as the third American watch manufacturer.

But all of these were merely forerunners, for now there stepped upon the stage a young man whose ability and perseverance were destined to launch American watch-making fairly upon its way. This young man was born in Hingham, Massachusetts, in 1813, and his name was Edward Howard; it was born in him to be an inventive and ingenious craftsman and to feel toward the mechanism of time-keeping the devotion of an artist to his art. At the age of sixteen, he was apprenticed to Aaron Willard, Jr., of Roxbury, one of the cleverest clock-makers of his time.

Young Howard took to clock-making as naturally as a Gloucester man takes to the sea. Some of the clocks he then made are still ticking as vigorously as ever. Having presently learned all he cared to know about clock-making, he cast about for other fields of action. His bent, as he himself said, "was all for the finer and more delicate mechanism," and it was natural that these qualities of the watch should absorb his interest. It was equally natural, since he was an American clock-maker at a time when that trade was being revolutionized by machine-work, that he should dream of applying such methods to the watch.

"One difficulty I found," he is quoted as saying, "was that watch-making did not exist in the United States as an industry. There were watchmakers, so-called, at that time, and there are great numbers of the same kind now, but they never made a watch; their business being only to clean and repair. I knew from experience that there was no proper system employed in making watches. The work was all done by hand. Now, hand-work is superior in many of the arts because it allows variation according to the individuality of the worker. But in the exquisitely fine wheels and screws and pinions that make up the parts of a watch, the less variation the better. Some of these parts are so fine as to be almost invisible to the naked eye. A variation of one five-thousandths of an inch would throw the watch out altogether, or make it useless as a timepiece. As I say, all of these minute parts were laboriously cut and filed out by hand, so it will readily be understood that in watches purporting to be of the same size and of the same makers, there are no two alike, and there was no interchangeability of parts. Consequently it was 'cut and try'. A great deal of time was wasted and many imperfections resulted."

Howard's ambition lay in the production of a perfect watch for its own sake; and he wanted to make it by machinery, believing that, in that way, it could be made most perfectly. Other people had thought of the same thing. Pitkin had attempted it, and there had been some experiments of like nature in Switzerland. But the man who loves his work as Howard did will succeed in anything short of the impossible, because neither time nor labor, neither failure nor discouragement, matter at all to him as against the hope of making his dream come true.

As Howard was emerging into young manhood, the great period of American invention was rapidly developing. Morse was struggling with the electric telegraph which he invented and perfected in 1835, and Goodyear was busy with machinery and processes for enabling rubber to be used commercially, thus laying the foundation for one of the greatest American industries of to-day. Ingenuity was in the air and invention was conquering realms that had been believed beyond reach.

When people told Howard that it was absurd to think of improving upon the manual skill of centuries, he answered that he expected to make his machinery by hand. And when they said that a machine for watch-making would be more wonderful than the watch itself, he only laughed and agreed that this might be so.

To-day, we are familiar with such phrases as "standardized parts" and "quantity production," which explain to us how it is possible for a single factory to produce millions of watches in a year, or for another kind of plant to turn out half a million automobiles in a like period. The way in which "quantity production" came about is curiously interesting. Watch-making received one of its greatest impulses from a famous American inventor who probably would have been amazed had anyone told him that his idea upon quite another subject would some day help to put watches into millions of pockets.

There is no particular connection between a cotton-gin and the "quantity production" of watches, but it is interesting to know that the same ingenious brain which designed the one also unconsciously suggested the other. Late in the eighteenth century, Eli Whitney gained lasting fame as the inventor of a machine which would automatically separate the seeds from the fiber of crude cotton – a machine which revolutionized the cotton industry of the south.

In 1798, Whitney secured a contract to manufacture rifles for the government. He decided that they could be made much more rapidly and cheaply if he could find some way to produce all the separate parts in large quantities by machinery, and then merely assemble the various parts into the completed weapon. The inventive mind which was capable of devising the cotton-gin found this new problem to be comparatively simple, and it was not long before Whitney was making thousands of rifles from machine-made "standardized parts," where only one could be made before. Half a century later his machinery was still turning out rifles parts in the great arsenal at Springfield, Massachusetts, and it was not until this period that it exerted a distinct influence upon watch-making.

While Howard in Roxbury was dreaming of producing watches by machinery, another young man – Aaron L. Dennison, of Boston – was also obsessed with the same dream and grappling with the same problem. It is therefore not strange that the paths of these two soon crossed. Born in Freeport, Maine, 1812, Dennison was just a year older than Howard. He was an expert watch-repairer and watch-assembler, having learned his craft among the Swiss and the English workmen in New York and Boston. The year 1845 found him conducting a small watch and jewelry business in Boston.

Some few years earlier, Dennison had visited friends in Springfield, Massachusetts, and while there he was taken to one of the interesting show-places of the town – the Springfield Arsenal. As he made his slow progress through the great rifle factory, he marveled at the wonderful machinery and the system which had originated in the brain of Eli Whitney nearly half a century before; Whitney was dead and gone, but his works still lived.

Dennison returned to Boston, fired with an ambition to apply the Whitney system and methods of rifle-making to the manufacture of watches. He brooded over the scheme for years, constructing a pasteboard model of his imaginary watch factory and planning in detail its organization.

Then occurred a meeting that was to make history – a meeting marking the first step in founding a great American industry and wresting from Europe and Great Britain the watch-making monopoly which they had continuously held since the days of the "Nuremburg Egg." Dennison met Howard, and the contact of the two minds was like the meeting of flint and steel. Dennison shared Howard's belief that watch-parts could be made better and more accurately by the use of machines. He had the watch-making experience and Howard the mechanical skill to design the new machinery. One may imagine how the two young men inspired each other. They had the ideas; all they now needed was the capital and this was supplied in 1848 by Mr. Samuel Curtis, who backed them to the extent of twenty thousand dollars.

Dennison immediately went abroad to study methods in England and Switzerland and came back more than ever convinced of the soundness of their own ideas.

"I have examined," said he, "watches made by a man whose reputation at this moment is far beyond that of any other watchmaker in Great Britain and have found in them such workmanship as I should blush to have it supposed had passed from under my hands in our own lower grade of work. Of course I do not mean to say that there is not work in these watches of the highest grade possible, but errors do creep in and are allowed to pass the hands of competent examiners. And it needs but slight acquaintance with our art to discover that the lower grade of foreign watches are hardly as mechanically correct in their construction as a common wheelbarrow."

On his return, in 1850, he and Howard established themselves in a small factory in Roxbury, under the name of the American Horologe Company. And that little factory was the foundation of what is now the great establishment of the Waltham Watch Company, the first and hence the oldest watch company in America, and the parent concern of most of the rest.

It was perhaps at this time that an employee, one P. S. Bartlett, returned to his home town on a visit and was asked by his old neighbors what he had been doing.

"I am working," said he, "for a company which makes seven complete watches in a day." Great was the merriment at this reply. "Why, where on earth could you sell seven watches a day?" they shouted.

With the advent of the factory, the real troubles of Dennison and Howard began. It is worth while to glance for a moment at the problem which lay before them, if only to appreciate its difficulty. The old plan was to have a model watch made by hand by a master workman. This watch was then taken apart and its separate parts distributed for reproduction by a multitude of specialized workers involving perhaps some forty or fifty minor trades. These parts, hand-made after a hand-made model, were then returned to the expert who assembled and adjusted them. At the worst, this resulted in gross error; at the best, in individual variation. A part from one watch could not be expected to fit and work accurately in another, although the two were supposed to be alike in all their parts.

The new idea was first to lay out the whole design on paper and then to make the various parts by machinery according to the exact design. It was supposed that a machine making one part would duplicate that part repeatedly without variation; that in so far as the machines themselves were accurate, the parts produced would necessarily be interchangeable; that any set of parts could therefore be assembled without fitting or alteration. The finished watch, it was assumed, would require adjustment only. Theoretically, this idea was correct; practically, it could not be perfectly carried out, and the results did not fulfil the hopes of the manufacturers. In the first place, there were not in existence any machines of the required delicacy and precision; every one must first be invented, then designed, then made, and finally adjusted for practical operation. Even so, and notwithstanding the great mechanical achievements of the Waltham Company, the results never succeeded in realizing the dreams of Howard and Dennison, of absolute interchangeability of parts. It remained for the Ingersoll organization, many years later, to develop such a factory system.

Before Howard and Dennison could make a single watch, therefore, they had to invent all the mechanism, and themselves build and install every invention. Moreover, several of the processes had to be worked out from the ground up. There was nobody in America who understood watch-gilding, for example, or who could make dials or jewels.

Thus they set to work developing the machinery as fast as they could do so, and imported such parts as they themselves could not yet make. It was a staggering task and a discouraging devourer of capital. "I do not think," said Dennison many years later, "there were seven times in the seven years we were together that we had money enough to pay all our employees at the time their wages were due. Very often we would find ourselves without any cash on hand, but Mr. Howard would manage some way to produce enough to tide over with."

The two men made a perfect team, eager to give each other credit, and each having unbounded loyalty and confidence in the other and in their enterprise. But, curiously enough, it was Howard, the artist and dreamer, who seems to have developed into the business man of the two, in addition to being the inventor and engineer, whereas Dennison, the expert watch-repairer, became the designer and originator of plans. It was said of him long afterward that there was probably never an idea in American watch-making that had not at some time passed through Mr. Dennison's resourceful mind. He is known to many as the "Father of the American Watch Industry," although he insisted that Howard deserved the title as much if not more than he. Dennison schemed out what was to be done, while Howard found the money and invented the machinery with which to do it.

Their first model, an eight-day watch, was Dennison's idea. It was found to be impracticable and was soon abandoned in favor of a one-day model. The name of the company had to be changed, because it did not find favor with some of the English firms from whom they bought certain parts. They called it the "Warren Manufacturing Company" for a time, and their first few watches were marked with this name. Later on, they moved to a new factory at Waltham and incorporated under the name of the Waltham Improvement Company. It was while the act for its incorporation was before the Massachusetts legislature that some wag there produced the couplet:

All this time, the tools and machinery were giving trouble. There were innumerable difficulties. For example, New England workmen objected to cutting the pinion-leaves because they were shaped like a bishop's miter. And financial pressure was always upon them. The building was one of the earliest attempts at concrete construction, and was far from stable in stormy weather. Mr. Hull, afterward foreman in the dial-room, said: "Often in those days we would jump from our stools when we felt something jar, for fear the building would fall down. Somehow, it never did."

In 1854 the name was changed again, this time to the American Watch Company. Incidentally, Mr. Dennison took his place among the large and honorable company of inventors who have been called insane. He earned that title by saying that they would eventually make as many as fifty watches a day. The company now makes between two thousand and three thousand a day.

Just as they were on the point of a richly deserved success, the panic of 1857 drove the young company into bankruptcy. The plant was purchased by Royal E. Robbins, of the firm of Robbins & Appleton, watch importers. Howard went back to the old factory at Roxbury, taking with him a few trained workmen, and patiently started all over again. He succeeded, at last, in producing really fine watches, although in small numbers; and his new business, as we shall see later, developed into the E. Howard Clock Company, and practically abandoned the manufacture of watches. Meanwhile, the Waltham factory, under good business management and with Dennison as its superintendent, was safely steered past the financial rocks and shoals of the period, and began gradually to reap the reward of its less fortunate early efforts.

It was the Civil War, with its great military demand for watches, which first set the Waltham Company squarely upon its feet by justifying quantity production. A dividend of five per cent was declared in 1860; and one of one hundred and fifty per cent in 1866, the short-lived Nashua Watch Company having meanwhile been absorbed. Since that date its name has been twice changed – first, to the American Waltham Watch Company, and then to the Waltham Watch Company, which is now its title.

At the present day, the Waltham Company employs nearly four thousand people and produces about sixty-eight thousand complete watch-movements a month, or over three-quarters of a million a year.

This output is made possible only through the extensive employment of automatic machines, all of which have been invented and manufactured at the Waltham factory. Even now it is not possible to buy watch-making machinery ready-made in the open market; it is all "special" work, designed and often built by the watch manufacturers themselves. And the development of this great industry, employing, at first, crude devices operated for the most part by hand-power, to the complex automatic mechanism which seems to act almost with human intelligence, has been a marvelous achievement.

The company now makes ten different sizes of regular movements, in more than a hundred different grades and styles. Of these every part is made in the Waltham factory. It was the first establishment in the world in which all parts of a watch were made by machinery and under the same roof. And its success revolutionized the methods of watch-making not only in America but, to a less degree, in all parts of the world. A prominent London watchmaker who went through the plant in the early period of its success said to his colleagues: "On leaving the factory, I felt that the manufacture of watches on the old plan was gone." And the name passed into literature when Emerson, describing a successful type of man, said, "He is put together like a Waltham watch."

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Checkered History

One of those mental marvels who can play fifteen simultaneous games of chess, blindfolded, might be able to form a complete idea of the American watch-making industry in the years that followed the Civil War; all that the ordinary mind can gain is a bewildering impression of change and confusion, with companies springing up, and merging or disappearing, all over the industrial map. Inventions were as thick as blackberries in August and, to investors, as thorny as their stems. Countless revolutionary ideas in watch-making revolved briefly – few evolved, and capitalists, large and small, learned the sobering lessons of experience, as capitalists ever have and ever will.

With it all, certain points seem to stand out as clearly defined – among them the fact that watch-production appealed strongly to the public mind at a time when the nation, galvanized into intense activity by the great conflict, was entering an era of extraordinary self-organization. This is, of course, significant. The nation's time as well as its forests, mines, and other resources, must be a factor in the growth of public wealth, and this could not be unless it were widely and accurately measured, which, in turn, implied the universal use of the watch.

The later history of American watch-making is, therefore, a story of the formation of many companies, the failure of most, and survival in the case of comparatively few. In the sense of being founded by men whose experience had been gained at Waltham, the Waltham Company was more or less the parent of the majority. Of the failures, it may roughly and broadly be stated that the general trouble was most often a lack of cooperation between technical watch-making skill and business management.

Of the occasional successes due, on the other hand, to perfect harmony between these two factors, the Elgin National Watch Company, established at Elgin, Illinois, in 1864, was one of the first. Its officials and promoters were not watchmakers but business men – a group of Western capitalists who organized the company at the suggestion of a few trained men from Waltham, to whose technical experience and knowledge they gave entire liberty of action from the first. This combination of Western enterprise and Eastern mechanical skill was a great and immediate success. Within six years from its incorporation, the Elgin Company had built its factory, designed and made its own machinery, and marketed forty-two thousand watches. It is said to be the only American watch company which has paid dividends from the beginning. And yet this achievement cannot be traced to anything strikingly distinctive either in the policy or in the product. It was a case of doing rapidly and easily, with vast previous experience to build upon, what the parent company had so long strived to accomplish, and of doing this honestly and well. In a small way, it was like the rapid growth of democratic principles in America, having, as it were, the British commonwealth of a thousand years on which to base itself.

The period of the development of American watch-making was also the period of the rapid and enormous expansion of railroads. The two were naturally related, in that railroading demands the constant use of a great number of watches, while its progress in punctuality and speed is in direct proportion to the supply of reliable timekeepers. Precision is here the great essential; every passenger must have the means of being on hand in time in order not to miss his train. But what is of far greater importance, railroad men must know and keep the exact time not alone for their own protection but in order that they may protect and safeguard the lives of those who are entrusted to their care.

Most of our great inventions and improvements can be traced to some pressing human need. Many of them, unfortunately, are delayed until some great catastrophe shows the need. It required a disastrous wreck to bring home to the railroads and make clear the necessity for absolute accuracy in the timepieces of their employees.

In the year 1891 two trains on the Lake Shore Railroad met in head-on collision near Kipton, Ohio, killing the two engineers and several railway mail-clerks. In the investigation which followed, it was disclosed that the watches of the engineers differed by four minutes. The watch which was at fault had always been accurate and so its owner took it for granted that it always would be. But tiny particles of dust and soot find ways of seeping into the most carefully protected works of a watch, and every watch should be examined and cleaned occasionally. So it was with the engineer's watch. A speck of coal dust, perhaps, had caused his watch to stop for a few minutes and then the jolting of the engine had probably started it running again. That little speck of dust and those few lost minutes cost human lives.