The American Watch Industry

No country transformed watchmaking more completely than the United States. In 1850, America made virtually no watches. By 1880, it was the largest watch-producing nation on earth. The method it used — machine production with fully interchangeable parts — was so revolutionary that it forced every other watchmaking nation to industrialise or perish. The story of the American watch industry is the story of how an old craft became modern manufacturing.

Aaron Dennison and the Boston Vision

In 1849, Aaron Lufkin Dennison — a Maine-born watchmaker who had visited the great English watch factories and been unimpressed — conceived a radical alternative. Rather than dividing labour among craftsmen who still each completed multiple operations by hand, Dennison proposed building dedicated machine tools for every operation, so that each part would emerge from its machine already finished to the exact specification, needing no hand-fitting. Parts would be so precise that any escape wheel would drop into any movement of the same model without alteration.

This was the American System of manufacturing — already proven with rifles at the Springfield Armoury and with clocks by Eli Terry in Connecticut — applied to watchmaking for the first time. Dennison persuaded Samuel Curtis and Edward Howard to back the venture. In 1850 they rented a mill at Roxbury, Massachusetts, and the American Horology Company — soon reorganised as the Boston Watch Company, then the Waltham Watch Company — began production.

The early years were miserable. The machine tools had to be designed from scratch; no watchmaking machinery of the required precision existed. Quality was poor and the venture repeatedly ran out of money. By 1858 the company had been reorganised three times and Dennison had left. But the machinery was working, and the movements emerging from it were genuinely interchangeable. The system was proved.

The Civil War — the Industry's Making

The American Civil War (1861–1865) transformed the fortunes of Waltham and created the mass market for pocket watches. Before the war, most American men had never owned a watch. The war put hundreds of thousands of men in uniform, and coordinating troop movements, artillery barrages, and supply logistics required accurate timekeeping at every level of command. The Army Quartermaster Corps purchased watches in quantity; sutlers sold them to soldiers at a premium; and officers who could afford better bought the best.

Waltham's output soared. The factory at Waltham, Massachusetts — a purpose-built multi-storey manufactory employing hundreds of workers — ran at full capacity throughout the war. By 1865, 150,000 movements per year were leaving the factory. The price of a Waltham watch had fallen sharply as production volumes rose, and the American pocket watch had become an object that a working man could aspire to own.

Elgin: The Second Giant

In 1864, a group of Chicago businessmen organised the National Watch Company at Elgin, Illinois — a planned watchmaking town built from scratch forty miles northwest of Chicago. They hired Benjamin Raymond (former mayor of Chicago), recruited experienced Waltham watchmakers and machinists, and set up a factory on Waltham's model. The first Elgin movement was produced in 1867.

Elgin grew rapidly. By the 1880s it had surpassed Waltham in output and would eventually produce over 60 million movements — the largest total of any American maker. The Elgin range covered every quality tier from the basic 7-jewel economy movement to the superb 23-jewel Veritas and 21-jewel Father Time railroad grades. The Elgin National Watch Company became the company name in 1874, and the factory at Elgin, Illinois — visible from the railway that carried its products to market — was one of the great industrial landmarks of the American Midwest.

Illinois: Springfield and the Bunn Special

The Illinois Watch Company was founded in Springfield, Illinois in 1869, with financial backing from the governor of the state. Its most famous product was the Bunn Special — a 21-jewel railroad grade named for Jacob Bunn, the company's principal backer — which became one of the definitive American railroad watches and remains highly collected today. The A. Lincoln grade, named for Abraham Lincoln (a Springfield resident), was the Illinois flagship. Illinois was acquired by Hamilton in 1927.

Hampden, Howard, and the Others

The 1870s and 1880s saw a proliferation of American watch companies. The Hampden Watch Company (originally the Springfield Watch Company, Massachusetts) produced quality movements including the New Railway and Special Railway grades. Edward Howard, who had been involved in the original Waltham venture, established his own firm in Boston making high-grade movements with unique series-letter serial numbers — Howard watches were not numbered sequentially but by series (Series I, Series II, etc.), a system that makes them interesting to research and highly collectable.

Smaller makers including Rockford, South Bend, Columbus, and Seth Thomas competed in various market segments. The Ball Watch Company — not a manufacturer but a distributor — contracted with Hamilton, Waltham, Elgin, and Illinois to supply movements certified to Ball's exacting railroad standards, marked with Ball's own name.

The Kipton Disaster and the 1891 Standards

On 19 April 1891, two passenger trains collided near Kipton, Ohio on the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway, killing nine people. The subsequent investigation found that the engineer of one train had been running four minutes late, apparently because his watch had stopped and then restarted without his noticing. The disaster prompted the railway companies to act: in 1891, Webb C. Ball — a Cleveland jeweller appointed General Time Inspector for several railroads — developed the General Railroad Timepiece Standards.

These standards were stringent: a watch had to be 18 or 16 size, open-face, lever-set, with at least 17 jewels, adjusted to at least five positions and temperature, running to no more than 30 seconds per week variation, with a white dial and bold Arabic numerals readable in poor light. Only the best movements from any maker could meet these requirements consistently, and meeting them became a major marketing point.

Hamilton: Lancaster's Finest

The Hamilton Watch Company was founded in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1892 — the year after the railroad standards were set — and from the outset positioned itself as the premier railroad watch maker. Hamilton's Grade 940 (21 jewels, adjusted five positions) and Grade 992 (21 jewels, 16 size, adjusted five positions and temperature) became the standard American railroad watch of the early twentieth century. The Grade 950 and 950B (23 jewels, adjusted six positions and isochronism) represent the absolute peak of American pocket watch production.

Hamilton's quality control was exceptional. Every railroad-grade movement was timed and certified before leaving the factory; many still carry their original certificates. Hamilton also produced the Model 22 deck watch for the United States Navy in the Second World War — a 21-jewel movement in a heavy chrome case that served as the navigator's working instrument on board ship.

The Wristwatch and the Quartz Collapse

The First World War established the wristwatch as a masculine garment; by the 1930s the pocket watch was already old-fashioned among the young. The American companies diversified into wristwatch production, but their pocket watch lines persisted as long as the railroad market sustained them. When the railroads modernised — diesel replaced steam, centralised dispatching replaced the station agent with his pocket watch — the last real commercial reason for the American pocket watch evaporated.

The quartz revolution of the 1970s finished the job. Swiss cheap quartz movements from Seiko, Citizen, and Swiss manufacturers — accurate to seconds per month, inexpensive, and maintenance-free — destroyed the market for mechanical watchmaking at every price point below the luxury tier. The American companies, which had never competed in the luxury segment, had nowhere to go.

Why American Watches Are Collected Today

The antique American pocket watch is collected for reasons that have nothing to do with the competitive pressures that destroyed the industry. A 21-jewel Hamilton 992B in a solid gold case is a precision instrument of genuine excellence — one that keeps time as well as any modern mechanical watch and does so with a clarity and directness of design that a century has done nothing to diminish. The railroad grades in particular — made to a standard imposed by public safety rather than commercial calculation — are as honest and uncompromising as the men who designed and carried them.

For individual maker histories, see: Waltham, Elgin, Hamilton, Illinois, Hampden, E. Howard.