Time Telling through the Ages

Geneva "saw it first," but kept it so closely to herself that it was several generations later before watches were known in the Neuchatel district not far away, yet, this district is another great center of the industry.

It is said that in 1680, more than one hundred years after Charles Cusin moved to Geneva, a horse-dealer from the little town of La Sagne, came home from his travels and brought with him an English watch. Great was the wonder that it excited among the simple people of his native place. They passed from hand to hand the little ticking mechanism which had the strange power to tell time, and then one day the ticking ceased, which perhaps is not surprising, in view of the freedom with which the watch had been handled.

The horse-dealer knew nothing of the mechanism but was very anxious to have the works set right. It chanced that there was a young locksmith in La Sagne, a lad of only fifteen, named Daniel Jean Richard, who was so skilful and ingenious that he had already made repairs in the tower clock of the village. "Show the watch to Daniel Jean Richard" said everybody.

The delighted lad began to take the delicate mechanism apart, studying carefully each wheel and spring and lever until he felt that he understood exactly how it should work. Then, when he had succeeded in reassembling the parts and in making the watch tick bravely once more, he was seized with a great ambition to build another one all by himself.

After many experiments with his crude locksmith tools, he did produce a watch which would run and which would tell time after a fashion – the first watch ever made in the Neuchatel district – but it did not satisfy his artist's soul and he realized that he must have better tools.

Somebody told him that there was in Geneva a machine for cutting wheels, and he set out to see it for himself, only to come back sadly disappointed. Wherever he asked to see the machine, the canny Geneva craftsmen shook their heads. This eager lad from another town had far too intelligent a face to be allowed to learn the precious secrets. The most that they would do was to let him have a few of the wheels made by the machine.

Then he began to work out for himself a machine to cut the wheels, and at last succeeded in the task, so that before long he was well on the way to becoming a watch manufacturer. Richard, however, was generous with his ideas; he instructed a number of the young men of his district, so that watchmaking soon began to flourish in his town and in those about it.

We have now seen how the watchmaking industry became established in two great centers – in Geneva, where the highest quality was maintained, but under the rule of the guild, which did not encourage quantity of output, and in the Neuchatel region where no guild system existed. In the course of time this latter region overtook and passed in quantity of output that of Geneva. By 1818, the Neuchatel district of the Jura was turning out watches at the rate of 130,000 a year.

The solid old Geneva watchmakers criticized their rivals as being less exacting in quality and less careful as to the standard of gold used in their cases, but the Neuchatel people had no difficulty in finding customers; we read that one hundred and forty of their merchants went twice a year to the Leipsig fair, where they sometimes sold watches to the value of four million francs ($800,000) in a year.

The two principal centers of Swiss watchmaking have been mentioned although, of course, watches were made in other districts as well. It is easy to see that many generations ago it had already become a very large industry, and so we need not be surprised to learn that even to-day the tiny inland country produces a larger annual export value of watches than even our vast United States. Watchmaking has been so large a source of wealth that the Swiss government has aided it in every way, including the establishment of schools and courses for training skilled workmen. More than sixty thousand Swiss people are directly employed in the Swiss watch industry and over three hundred thousand, or one-twelfth of the entire population, are indirectly connected with it. The Swiss have also made many inventions and improvements so that they have had much to do with the development of the watch itself as well as with the industry.

As we have already seen, it was a Swiss who invented the fusee, another who introduced the use of jewels for reducing friction and the stemwind is also of Swiss origin. It was the Swiss, too, who, early in the nineteenth century, did away with the solid upper plate which covered the works and used, instead, a system of bridges. The bridge form of movement allows each part to be repaired or adjusted separately and to-day it is to be found in all watches of the higher grades.

The Swiss invention of the fusee, described in Chapter VIII, played an important part for several hundred years, but at last it was replaced by something simpler and still more effective. Made to equalize the difference in the pressure exerted by a stiff mainspring when first wound up and when partly run down, it worked beautifully but was rather clumsy; and it required comparatively heavier parts which naturally necessitated the use of greater power. Thus friction and, consequently, wear were increased. But the Swiss by making watch-parts that were very light but yet strong, and by reducing friction principally through the introduction of jewels into the mechanism, succeeded at last in getting a movement that could be run with very little power. So they now could use a weak and slender mainspring, made so long that only its middle part ever was wound and unwound, and thus the pressure remained equal, and the use of the fusee was no longer necessary. This principle, called the "going barrel" construction, reduced friction, and made the thin modern watch a possibility. The American makers, as we shall presently see, adopted the "going barrel" construction practically from the first. They had no traditional prejudices, and they knew a good mechanical idea when they saw it.

But the British would have none of it. Their national bulldog quality set its teeth on the old idea that had given them their heavy, substantial, accurate watches, and hung on grimly. The Swiss watches might be lighter and more graceful but they questioned their lasting qualities. The Swiss could make watches more beautifully, but the English were suspicious of cheapness and declined to adopt the new development.

Thus the English, who up to about 1840, had led the world in the manufacture and sale of watches, began to fall behind. The American watch industry was then in its infancy, and the French industry had never been of any great size. The Swiss gradually drew ahead until they practically gained control of the world's market for watches. Switzerland became known as the place from which watches came, and, very much as "Havana" stands for a fine cigar, so a fine watch was apt to be called a "Geneva."

This, then, was the situation at about the middle of the nineteenth century when watchmaking in America was beginning to grow into a large industry. The French had always made good watches and very beautiful and elaborate ones too, but they never made very many. The English were falling behind so far that it was said, in 1870, that half the watchmakers' tools in England were in pawn. The Swiss were in control of the business, making both the best and the worst watches in the world and by far the greatest number. Everywhere a good watch was still too costly to be owned by anyone of moderate means, while cheap watches were little more than toys which could not be depended upon either to wear well or to keep good time.

In spite of all developments, therefore, there still remained the need both for a high-grade watch at a reasonable price and for a cheap watch that would be accurate under rough usage. These things were genuinely necessary, for the world was growing steadily away from the theory of special privilege, and the requirements of the average man were becoming more insistent.

From those early days, when the astrologers in Mesopotamia had kept their knowledge a secret for themselves, down through more than forty centuries, only a few had possessed the means of accurately telling time; but now had come the railroad, the telegraph, the modern factory, the newspaper and many other developments which speeded up the movements of humanity in the rush and whirl of modern life until it had become absolutely necessary that the means of measuring and performing those movements in an economical manner should be within the reach of every man.

It remains to be shown how American watchmaking discovered this need and organized to meet it; how it found and filled the gap that had been left in foreign watchmaking, between high-priced watches that were good, and low-priced watches that were not good; how it developed a cheaper good watch and a better low-priced one than the world had so far known; and how, in so doing, the American industry has grown within the memory of living men to such an extent as to take second place, and, in many respects, first place in watchmaking throughout the world.

CHAPTER TWELVE

How An American Industry Came On Horseback

At last the clock industry came to America, and it came on horseback. If you had been upon a dusty country road in Connecticut about the year 1800, you might have seen a plainly dressed young man come riding along with a clock strapped to each side of his saddle and a third fastened crosswise behind him.

"Hello, Eli Terry!" you might have heard some farmer sing out, as the rider drew near.

"Hello, Silas," the other would call back; "don't you think it's about time you bought a clock?"

"Can't afford it, Eli; it takes me a long time to make forty dollars raising wheat."

"Yes; but you can't afford to be without one, Silas." And, dismounting, he would unstrap one of the clocks and bring it up to the stone wall. Then would follow the period of bargaining, so dear to the shrewd, hard-headed sons of Connecticut. Perhaps when young Terry climbed back into the saddle and said "Gid-dap," one of his clocks would stay behind with the farmer. Like most successful salesmen, Terry was a close observer of human nature; he knew that habits once formed are hard to break. He discovered early that if a prospective customer could be made to depend upon a clock for telling time, the clock would soon sell itself. One day, during a rain-storm, he sought refuge in a farmer's home. He brought in with him one of his clocks and placed it on the mantel over the fireplace, explaining that he would like to leave it there, where it would not get wet, while he continued on his journey.

"I'll be back for it in a few days," he said, as he waved good-by.

When Terry returned, some days later, the farmer realized that the clock, which he had first regarded as an extravagance had somehow become a necessity, and, with no urging on Terry's part, the sale was quickly completed.

Some of the original clocks are still running in the very farmhouses where Eli Terry succeeded in selling them, and where they have ticked off the minutes of American history since the days of Adams and Jefferson. They were truly remarkable clocks, in spite of the fact that their works were cut out of hard wood with country tools, and put together by a carpenter.

The first American clocks were made of wood, and most of the early clockmakers were at first carpenters. We have seen clockmakers developing from priests and astronomers and blacksmiths and locksmiths and jewelers; but here is a new gateway to the trade. This came about naturally enough in a country where the cheapest and most plentiful material was wood, and where the carpenter and joiner was accustomed to constructing every possible thing of it. Eli Terry of Connecticut was one of the best known of these early New England craftsmen. He was born in East Windsor, just a few years before the Revolution. By the time that he was twenty, he had made a few clocks, cutting the wheels out of hard wood with saw and file, and making wooden hands, dials, and cases. Then he moved to Plymouth, not far from Waterbury, and set up a small shop where he employed several workmen. They would make a dozen or two at a time, entirely by hand. Then Terry would take these out and sell them, sometimes as far as the "new country" across the New York state line.

It took a long time to make a clock in this way, even for fingers that were as clever as Terry's, and it is no wonder that he was compelled to charge from twenty to forty dollars apiece, a sum, which, by-the-way, would be equal to at least four times as much to-day according to the difference in the purchasing power of money. We must remember, too, that a family then bought its clock as it bought a wagon or a spinning-wheel, almost as a man buys his house to-day. Certainly it was a far more important transaction relatively than the purchase of a motor-car.

Probably, if one could have overheard some of these roadside clock-sales it would have been noted that the bargaining was not all upon one side, for there was not a great deal of money in circulation, and people were very apt to "swap." Likely as not, Terry would have to take his payment in lumber, in clothing, or in some other commodity and these, in turn, he would dispose of when an opportunity presented itself. This was more or less the type of the old horseback Yankee trader of the days when men still remembered the Revolutionary War. These were the days when a man who produced some one thing might be forced, in order to realize on its value, to trade it for almost anything else.

When we think of the early American timepiece, we generally picture to ourselves the so-called "Grandfather's Clock," the kind with the tall case which Longfellow wrote about as standing on a turning in the stair and ticking away: "Forever!" "Never!" "Never!" "Forever!" as it marked the passage of the years. But Eli Terry, the first of all American clock-makers, could not well carry such a big contrivance with him on his horseback trips; therefore, while he made the works for these clocks, he left it for other people to construct the cases; the clocks which he sold complete were those which could stand upon a shelf or hang upon the wall.

After a time, his orders increased to a point where he felt justified in moving into an old water-power mill and rigging machinery to do some parts of the work. Thus we find machinery used in American clock-making almost from the beginning of the industry. Terry thus was a real manufacturer; he had grasped the importance of machine production in contrast to hand-craftsmanship.

The move paid; it cut the cost of making nearly in half and greatly increased the output. He now could afford to sell his clocks more cheaply, and the business grew at once. After a while he began to make clocks in lots of one or two hundred and then, indeed, his neighbors shook their heads gravely.

"You are losing your mind, Eli," they told him, in solemn warning. "The first thing you know, the country will be so full of clocks that there will be no market for them. You are getting reckless and ruining your business."

But Eli Terry followed his own judgment instead of that of the croakers; before he died he was making ten or twelve thousand clocks in a year and was selling them too. They brought him a fortune.

Thus was the industry of making timepieces born in America. It began in New England, which is still the chief center of manufacture, and it began with clocks, not watches, for the simple reason that in those days, a watch was a luxury whereas a clock was a necessity. Like the watch industry in Switzerland, American clock-making was an active business from the start, and, as we have seen, the man with whom it started was a typically Yankee combination of ingenious mind, skilful fingers, and a knack for business.

Of course, the conditions of life in America at that time had a great deal to do with methods used in building up the industry. Instead of a civilization centuries old that had wealth, rank, royalty, and a complete organization of all methods of living, here was a new country learning to do things in its own way.

It is hard for us to imagine the conditions which prevailed when our whole population was a mere fringe of scattered settlements along the Atlantic seaboard; when people made long trips on horseback or by stage-coach and men wore powdered wigs and knickerbockers; when New York was a small town on the lower end of Manhattan Island, and Chicago had not even been dreamed of. Still, it was necessary to tell time, and our thrifty ancestors needs must watch the minutes in order to save them as thriftily as they saved everything else. Not one person out of hundreds, in a country where a living must be wrung from the soil by means of hard work, could afford to own anything so expensive as a watch, but every one felt it necessary to have a clock, if possible, and it became one of the greatest treasures of the home.

This, then, was the market in which Terry and those who followed him had to sell. It was a market that could not afford to pay for ornament but desired practical service at low cost. What was needed, therefore, was a clock that would keep time and cost not a cent more than was absolutely necessary. The American industry was forced to start upon a basis entirely different from that of Europe.

As Eli Terry's business grew, he needed assistance, and he secured the help of a young mechanic named Seth Thomas from West Haven, and the two worked together for some time.

The name of Seth Thomas has appeared upon so many clock-dials that it is perhaps the best known name in all American clock-making. He was a good mechanic, and a good business man, and he had ideas of his own about increasing trade. In the course of time, about the year 1800, he and a man named Silas Hoadley bought the original Terry factory in the old mill, and set up business for themselves. Terry, however, established himself elsewhere and continued to manufacture clocks.

Thus the industry was growing; there were now two factories instead of one. Seth Thomas prospered by adopting each popular fashion or improvement in clocks as it came along and applying it upon as large a scale and as honestly and well as could be done. He built up such a reputation that even to-day, while the name of Seth Thomas on a clock face does not suggest any particular form or style of clock, it is associated with good time keeping and honest workmanship.

The third of the famous old New England clock-makers was Chauncey Jerome. He was a man younger than Terry and Thomas by nearly a generation. Like both of his predecessors he was brought up to the carpenter's trade, and like both of them he was a born New England trader. But of the three, Jerome was perhaps most the inventor and least the man of business. As a boy, he worked for Seth Thomas when Thomas was still building barns and houses. He worked for Eli Terry in the old shop at Plymouth. Then, after a period of soldiering in the War of 1812, he went back to clock-making, sometimes manufacturing by himself and sometimes associated with one or the other of the two older men, or in other firms and enterprises too numerous to follow. Always he seems to have been somewhat of a rolling stone, although in his time he gathered as much moss as the best of them: always he was inclined to experiment with new ideas.

Jerome's carpentering skill caused him to be first interested in the making of cases, and most of the familiar forms of old American clocks – the square clock with pillars at the corners and a scroll top, the clock with a mirror underneath the dial and the like, were designed by Terry and Jerome between them. Later on, when the establishment of brass foundries in Waterbury and Bristol had enabled American makers to construct their work of brass instead of wood, Jerome worked out a design for a brass one-day timepiece in a wooden case, small enough for easy transportation, and cheaper than any clock ever made up to that time. Its price at first, near the place of manufacture, was only five or six dollars, but afterwards this was reduced.

This low-priced clock was as remarkable in its way as was the dollar watch, which it foreshadowed. And like the watch, it would not have been possible except through machine work and quantity production. It was a success at once and Jerome's business rapidly increased. In 1840, he was established in Bristol, turning out the new clocks by the thousand, and rapidly making a fortune. A year or two later, he decided to send a consignment of them to England.

Again, people shook their heads and prophesied failure. "You're losing your mind, Chauncey," they told him as they had told Eli Terry before him.

The older wooden movements could not, of course, endure a sea voyage without swelling and becoming useless. A brass movement could, of course, be sent anywhere, and some of the more expensive ones had been shipped to all parts of the country, yet it seemed absurd enough to send American clocks to England where labor was so cheap – to England, which was then the chief clockmaker of the world. Nevertheless, Jerome persevered, and his son sailed for London with a cargo of the cheap clocks. At first, the English trade would have none of them. No clock so cheap could possibly be good, they said, and Connecticut was the home of "the wooden nutmegs." It was only after great difficulty that they were introduced. Young Jerome got rid of the first few by leaving them about in retail stores, asking no payment for them until sold.

The enterprise was saved by an event which was a joke in itself. The English revenue law at that time permitted the owner of imported goods to fix their taxable value. But the government could take any such property upon payment of a sum ten per cent greater than the owner's valuation. Jerome's clocks were valued at their wholesale price, and were presently seized by the customs officials on the ground that this valuation was fraudulently low.

The elder Jerome chuckled upon learning of this. He was well satisfied to have closed out his first cargo at ten per cent profit, and at once sent over another shipment which was taken over by the customs as promptly as the first. But by the time the third consignment arrived, enough of the clocks had been sold to establish a demand for them among the retailers, and the officials finally conceded that the low price might be a reasonable one after all.