Time Telling through the Ages

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.

This wreck occurred not many miles from Cleveland, Ohio, then and now the home of Webb C. Ball, a jeweler, who as a watch expert, was a witness in the investigation which followed. His interest thus aroused, he worked out a plan which provided for a rigid and continuous system of railroad watch inspection. The plan which he then proposed is now in operation on practically every railroad in the country.

A railroad watch must keep accurate time within thirty seconds a week, and is likely to be condemned if its variation exceeds that amount in a month; it must conform to certain specifications of design and workmanship which are only put into movements of a fairly high grade. And the railroad man must provide himself with such a timepiece and maintain it in proper condition, subject to frequent and regular inspection by the railroad's official inspector. There is thus a compulsory demand for watches of a definite quality and performance at a reasonable price.

Expressly to meet this, the Hamilton Watch Company, of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was organized in 1892, the year after the wreck which started this reform. This company therefore represents an enterprise founded for a specific purpose and concentrating upon a certain specialized demand, although this does not mean that it is the only company which caters to the needs of the railroad man. All of the great companies produce timekeepers of the highest precision for railroad use, but the Hamilton Company has devoted itself more particularly to supplying this one field.

The Gruen Watch Company, of Cincinnati, Ohio, is typical of still another line of endeavor – the beautifying and refining of watch-cases and watch-works. Its founder, Dietrich Gruen, was a Swiss master watchmaker. He came to America, as a young man, in 1876, married here, and established the international industry which bears his name. It might be said that his watch is not an American product, as the Gruen movements are made at Madre-Biel, in Switzerland, and then sent over to America to be cased, adjusted, and marketed. Perhaps the most notable contribution of this company to the watchmaking industry was to inaugurate the modern thin type of watch. This was evolved by Frederick, the son of Dietrich Gruen, and was made possible by the inverting of the third wheel of the watch, so that the whole train runs in much less space than was previously required.

These four companies are by no means the only successful ones, but they do typify the general trend of development of the American watch industry from 1850 until near the end of the nineteenth century, when a new and even greater era in the history of timekeeping was inaugurated. The story of this development will be considered in later chapters. In the period then closed, however, the ideal of Dennison and Howard, which most people then regarded as an impossibility, was realized to a degree which they themselves would never have thought possible. Dennison died in 1898 and Howard in 1904.

Although watch-making is the creation of European genius and was rooted in European experience, with boundless capital at its command and carried on in communities trained for generations in the craft, it is in this country that it has been brought to its fullest modern development. The census figures, while incomplete and somewhat misleading, are expressive of the amount of growth and of its nature. According to these figures there were in 1869 thirty-seven watch companies in the United States, employing eighteen hundred and sixteen wage earners, or an average of less than fifty workmen; and their combined product was valued at less than three million dollars. In 1914, the last normal year before the Great War, there were but fifteen such companies; the law of the survival of the fittest had been operating. But these fifteen employed an average of over eight hundred people, or twelve thousand three hundred and ninety in all, and the combined value of their product was stated as over fourteen million dollars. These figures are far below reality in that they do not include the large volume of watches produced in clock factories.

American watch-making is typical of the difference between the American and European industry in the nineteenth century. Here a complete watch is produced in one factory, while in England, Switzerland and France most establishments specialize in the manufacture of particular parts and these parts are then assembled in other factories. Some fifty different trades there are working separately to produce the parts. And the manufacturer, whose work is chiefly that of finishing and assembling, takes a large profit for inspection and for the prestige of his name.

By the American system, a thousand watches are produced proportionately more cheaply than a dozen; and a thousand of uniform model more cheaply than a like number of various sizes and designs. Automatic machines tend to economy of labor and uniformity of excellence. The saving begins with the cost of material and ends with the ease and quickness of repairs due to the standardization of parts.

Lord Grimthorpe said: "There can be no doubt that this is the best as well as the cheapest way of making machines which require precision. Although labor is dearer in America than here, their machinery enables them to undersell English watches of the same quality."

It now remained for American ingenuity and enterprise to level the ramparts of special privilege in the world of time-telling by producing an accurate and practical watch in sufficient quantity and at a price so low as to place it within the reach of all.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

"The Watch That Wound Forever"

The most important development in any affair is naturally the one which concerns the greatest number of people. In the United States, it is the people who count and nothing can be considered wholly American which does not concern the mass of the population. We have already seen how watch-movements were brought to a high degree of accuracy, and have followed some of the steps by which the industry was developed in the United States, but there remained one great step to be taken, and that was the putting of an accurate watch within the financial reach of almost every person. The way in which this was brought about was thoroughly American.

In 1875, Jason R. Hopkins, of Washington, D. C., after many months of patient labor, perfected the model of a watch which he thought could be constructed in quantities for fifty cents each. He secured a patent on his model, and with Edward A. Locke, of Boston, and W. D. Colt, of Washington, sought to interest the Benedict & Burnham Manufacturing Company, of Waterbury, Connecticut, in its manufacture.

Failing in this, Locke abandoned further effort so far as the Hopkins' model was concerned. Hopkins, however, continued, and finally succeeded in enlisting the active support and financial resources of W. B. Fowle, a gentleman of wealth and leisure, who owned a fine estate at Auburndale, Massachusetts. This led to the formation of the Auburndale Watch Company. Within a few years, Fowle had sunk his entire fortune of more than $250,000 in the enterprise, and the Hopkins watch had proved a complete failure. In 1883 both Fowle and the Watch Company made assignments.

There are many who still remember the great Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia in 1876, celebrating the one hundredth anniversary of the declaration of American Independence. Those who were there may recall the interesting exhibit of a huge steam-engine – at least, it seemed huge at that time – and, in a glass case near by, a tiny engine – so tiny that it could be completely covered by a small thimble. This midget steam engine, with its boiler, governor, and pumps, was just as complete in all of its parts as was the big engine. Three drops of water would fill its boiler. It was a striking example of mechanical skill and fineness of workmanship, for it had been made under a watchmaker's microscope with jeweler's tools.

The most interesting thing about this little engine was that, unknown to its designer, it heralded the dawn of Democracy in the Kingdom of Time-telling, just as it then was helping to celebrate the birth of American freedom. In the spring of 1877, Edward A. Locke, of Boston, who two years before, as we have seen, had been interested in the Hopkins' watch, visited the neighboring city of Worcester, and while strolling along the main street, in a leisurely manner, he chanced to glance in the window of a watch-repairer's shop. There he saw the tiny engine which had excited so much wonder and admiration at the Philadelphia exposition the year before.

For many months, Locke and his friend George Merritt, of Brooklyn, New York, had been thinking and dreaming of the possibility of supplying the long-felt and rapidly-growing need for a low-priced watch – a pocket-timepiece that could be sold for three or four dollars. The cheapest watch in America at that time cost ten or twelve. They had searched in vain for a watchmaker who was ingenious or courageous enough, or both, to attempt the making of such a timepiece.

Fascinated by the marvelous little engine, Locke stepped into the shop and spoke to the lone workman at the bench near the window. This obscure and humble watch repairer was D. A. A. Buck, the proprietor of the shop and designer of the engine, who was soon to gain renown as the inventor of the famous Waterbury watch.

For the sum of one hundred dollars Buck agreed to study the problem, and, if possible, design for Locke a watch which would meet his requirements. Day and night, for many weeks, he labored at this task, and finally submitted a model. It was not satisfactory.

Worn by his labors and disappointed by his failure, he fell ill. Some days later, Mrs. Buck sought out Locke and joyfully told him that her husband had worked out a new design which he believed would correct the defects of the former model and that, as soon as he recovered, he would begin work upon it. Within a few months he had completed a second model. This time he was successful.

Then began the struggle of Locke and his associates to interest capital in the new enterprise. Most of the preliminary funds and factory space were provided by the Benedict & Burnham Manufacturing Company, a brass manufacturing concern at Waterbury, Connecticut, and the predecessor of the present Waterbury Clock Company. Thus the new watch came to be known as the Waterbury.

Within the next twenty-eight months many thousands of dollars had been raised and expended before a single watch could be turned out for sale. It was not until 1880 that the Waterbury Watch Company was finally incorporated and ready for business. Then the factory proudly produced its first thousand watches. They were perfectly good-looking watches, but they had one important weakness – they would not run, because, as it was found, the sheets of brass used in stamping out the wheels had an unfortunate grain, and the wheels would not remain true. Another thousand were made with this defect corrected. This time most of the watches would keep time, but there still was a large percentage of "stoppers." After more study, experiment, and expense, the product was improved until only about ten per cent of the watches refused to run, and the Waterbury watch was really on the market.

It was a wonderfully simple piece of mechanism, very different from the ordinary watch. The whole works turned round inside of the case once every hour, carrying the hour-hand with them. The mainspring was coiled round the outside of the movement, so that the case formed a barrel, and was wound by the stem. It had the old duplex escapement of the days of Tompion and the dial was printed on paper, covered with celluloid and glued to the plate. It had only fifty-eight parts, kept time surprisingly well, was not much to look at, but was sold at the then unheard-of low price of four dollars.

It was put on the market with real Yankee ingenuity. Some of us remember when Waterbury watches were given away with suits of clothes, and the pride with which, as youngsters, we exhibited our first watches thus obtained to our playmates who were less fortunate. The nine-foot mainspring required unlimited winding, which was one of its chief joys, and our friends often solicited the privilege of helping in the operation. Some of the more ingenious among us held the corrugated stem against the side of a fence and made the watch wind itself by running along the fence's length, while other children looked on enviously.

In spite of the disadvantage of the time necessary for winding, perhaps in part because of it, the Waterbury watch became famous the world over and reached a very large sale for its day. It was more or less of a freak contrivance. People spoke of it with a smile. Minstrels opened their performances by saying, "We come from Waterbury, the land of eternal spring"; and there is a story of a Waterbury owner in a sleeping-car, winding until his arm ached and then passing it to a total stranger, saying, "Here, you wind this for a while," with the result that the stranger placed a large order for Waterbury watches to be sold by his agency in China.

At the time that the Waterbury watch was well established, the world had advanced to a point fairly approximating the life of to-day. All the marvels of invention which had lifted so much of the earth's manual labor from the shoulders of mankind and which had been expected to shorten working-hours and to cheapen products until the standards of living of all classes would be raised through the possession of beneficial products inexpensively produced – these had gone far toward establishing the factory system. Machinery had come into vogue in place of hand labor. The steam-engine, the sewing-machine, the railway, the steamboat, the cotton-gin, the threshing-machine and the harvester, were indispensable aids. Photography and typewriting were novelties no longer, and the phonograph was becoming familiar. Electricity had taken its place as one of man's most valuable servants, able to transmit his messages, furnish him with power, and turn his night into day. These are but a few of the countless improvements that had contributed to the rapid rise of this country as a manufacturing nation instead of one chiefly agricultural.

Millions had already found employment in the factories, the transportation systems, and other collective-labor establishments. Schools had multiplied throughout the country. Trains, for the most part, were run on schedule time. Business offices, accompanying the development of the great industrial concerns, employed thousands. The department store was beginning to appear. Public-utility organizations and government departments were growing complex and extensive.

Thus, in every direction a stirring impetus was being given toward those intricate modern conditions which depend upon the watch. The lives of nearly all people were beginning to be touched by affairs that demanded common punctuality a number of times every day – the hour of opening factory, school, office or store, the keeping of appointments, the closing of banks and of mails, and the departure of trains. The times were bursting with need for a closer watch on time. From the industrial president to the common laborer and school-child the pressure of modern life, with its demand for punctuality, was making itself increasingly felt.

Yet, strangely enough, watches were still regarded as luxuries. It was not yet realized that they belonged among the implements which the daily life required of all. The notion still held that the watch was the mark of the aristocrat – a piece of jewelry rather than an article of utility, a thing more for display than for use. And the prices of good watches, according to the standards of the day, were such as to perpetuate the idea.

It is no wonder then that, in spite of its crude characteristics, the low-priced Waterbury watch attained a considerable sale. A watch was a novelty, an uncommon possession among average people, and anything approximating a real watch was assured of a large sale if within reach of the ordinary purse. Therefore, the commercial failure of the Waterbury Watch Company involves something more than a mere business failure. Here is something which textbook economists may well undertake to explain, since the article was good, the need unsupplied, the competition feeble, and the profit satisfactory. The Waterbury watch enjoyed an initial success but, in spite of satisfactory quality, its sale gradually fell away, until, notwithstanding several refinancings and changes of management, undeserved failure ultimately overtook the first low-priced watch-venture. It was not the manufacturing problems, such as had overcome Howard and had sorely tried Dennison, but the problems of distribution which were the undoing of the Waterbury Company, and here the importance and power of the middleman stand out in an instructive way.

The conditions of the age demanded a cheap watch. Things to come could not eventuate except through the ability of everyone to measure his minutes. Almost from its first announcement, the Waterbury sprang into demand, but later succumbed to false policies of sales. Eagerness for the large and easy orders, which were momentarily attractive but finally fatal, spelled ruin.

When first put out, the watch was sold through stores at a very moderate price and proved to be such a sensation that it suggested itself to ingenious merchants as a trade-bringer when offered as a premium with other goods.

Sam Lloyd, the famous puzzle-man, was among those who saw this possibility and he devised a scheme which resulted in the giving-away of hundreds of thousands of Waterburys; it consisted of puzzles printed on cards. These puzzles were so simple and yet so cleverly designed that while anyone could solve them, each thought himself a genius for his success in doing so. Lloyd's idea was to take his puzzles to clothing stores all over the country and sell them with watches, in order that those dealers might distribute the puzzles all over town, together with an announcement of a guessing-contest. Each successful contestant, upon return of the puzzle with its solution, was privileged to buy a suit of clothes and get a Waterbury watch with it free of charge.

Such was the magic of a watch in those days that the Waterbury boomed the business of hundreds of clothiers, who, as in nearly all something-for-nothing schemes, were careful to add more than the cost of the watch to the price of the suit. Nevertheless the idea took so well that Lloyd spread it into Europe, China, and other parts of the world. Thus, the Waterbury watch became a familiar object in many lands. Adaptations of the scheme, applied to other wares, were carried out by him and by others until giveaway propositions became the main channel of distribution for these watches. For a time, such methods flourished and the regular trade of ordinary watch-dealers correspondingly languished. But, finally, the scheme-idea lost its novelty and pulling power. People would not forever buy clothes in order to get watches. In the process, the Waterbury name had become a byword for tricks in all trades. Shoddy clothes at all-wool prices had become associated with it in people's minds. They stopped buying these watches in ordinary stores because others "gave" them away. Regular dealers cut the prices to get rid of their stocks, and this led to further demoralization because customers never knew whether or not they were buying at the bottom price. Dealers could make no money on them under such market conditions and, because of this and of their shady association with give-away deals, the Waterbury name became a stench in the nostrils of the legitimate trade.

Thus, when the scheme-trade died away and the company again turned its attention to the watch-dealers whom it had forgotten in the flush of its easy success, it found no welcome. It had forsaken its source of steady customers and was now forsaken in return. After floundering about in several further reversals of trade policy and causing the loss of further investment for its backers, the Waterbury name was abandoned and the company reorganized as the New England Watch Company. As such it ventured into new fields of watch manufacture and offered an elaborate variety of small and fancy watches and cases, and numerous models, sizes, and styles of movements sold on vacillating marketing policies. Never did it attain a genuinely sound footing, however, for it vacated its field of fundamental and distinctive usefulness, viz., the production of a reliable, low-priced, simple watch, to meet the advancing requirements of its day; it had gone back to the view-point of the watch as an ostentatious or ornamental bit of vanity. Hence the old Waterbury business was compelled to close its doors, and in the fall of 1914, the first year of the Great War, was bought out at a receiver's sale by a firm who had replaced it in the field of supplying watches for the masses. This firm rededicated the organization to its original mission, modernized its mechanical equipment, and revived the Waterbury name after a lapse of twenty years, until to-day, through the employment of judicious sales-methods, the factory is more successful than ever it was in its earlier days.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

"The Watch That Made the Dollar Famous"

The next development is so typically American that it is difficult to picture it as occurring in any other country.

Heretofore, the history of timepieces had been that of an easily traceable evolution, for each of its steps had grown naturally out of those before it, and the various improvements had been made by mechanics trained in the craft. Yet now, strange to relate, two young men from a Michigan farm, with no mechanical training, entered the field almost in a casual manner, and in less than a generation not only became the world's largest manufacturers of watches but effected the most radical development in the whole story of telling time – involving, as it did, the introduction of interchangeable parts, quantity-production, and a low price.

These results might seem at first, to be due to a matter of accidental good fortune. On the contrary, they were an example of evolution quite as logical as any that had preceded and were perhaps even more significant. The whole development came as the direct product of observation, analysis, initiative, perseverance, and hard work – the element of good luck being conspicuously absent.

All history gives evidence of the occasional need of a new impulse derived from outside, and bringing with it a fresh view-point. There seems to be a tendency in human enterprise for any development after a time to lose its original rate of speed and to spend itself in complexities. The people who have brought it about appear to lose their power to see things simply and in a big way; and, on the contrary, they grow technical and occupy themselves with minor details. Whereupon the progress of development becomes slower and slower, and threatens to stop entirely. Then over and over again, there is the record of the advent of some fresh new force from an unexpected direction which restores youth and vigor.

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, watch-making seemed ready for such an impulse. As we have already seen, it had long been developing from within along technical and professional lines. Excellent and costly timepieces that were marvels of accurate mechanism had been produced. That part of its work had been well done, but the industry was in danger of losing its human touch. Watches were being viewed more as articles of manufacture and merchandise than as of wide-spread human service in meeting a general public need.

In a sense, therefore, the industry was unconsciously waiting the coming of a non-technical man who knew the public at first hand and understood people's requirements, who was not fettered by tradition, who had a vision of universal marketing and distribution, and who was not held back by a fore-knowledge of difficulties. It was exactly this vision which Robert H. Ingersoll had of the industry and he developed it with the assistance first of his brother, Charles H. and later of his nephew, William H. He did not "discover" the dollar watch, as many think, but grew toward it during the course of a dozen years.