They had special machinery that would make gears and special machinery that would make shafts and plates and little springs and all the various pieces of the watch, the screws and so forth, but it took a long time to develop all those machines. McIntyre: The point of manufacturing them was that if you made the same part over and over again, you could make it better than if you had to make each one from scratch each time. Collectors Weekly: Once Waltham introduced precision manufacturing, how did the quality of the watches change? The Pitkin watches used some machinery and were a first stab at doing it, but they didn’t do it all that well, so it didn’t really take off, and one of them went insane trying and killed himself. Luther Goddard and Benjamin Goddard and Parley Goddard made watches, but they were handmade watches. McIntyre: There were some brothers in Connecticut called the Pitkins who made some watches before that, and there was a family near Worcester, Mass. Collectors Weekly: Before that, were people making pocket watches in America at all? Those techniques were adopted and adapted by the people at Waltham to build pocket watches. The Springfield Armory built lots of rifles. The first experiments were at the Springfield Armory for the Civil War. But having an assembly line with lots of people working on it and putting things together in large volumes had never been done before. Then they would assemble it and have the watch run. An individual would sit down and work on pieces of metal until they had built all the pieces for a watch.
That whole manufacturing process was invented by Waltham for precision goods. They were always the two biggest.Īt that time there was nobody manufacturing pocket watches like we manufacture automobiles and appliances and various other things today. It’s almost like the American League and the National League in baseball. That was the second company that started up. The company that everybody calls Elgin was originally the National Watch Company. You can’t own the name America if the United States owns the name America. couldn’t really be protected as a brand name because America was the country.
They got into a trademark dispute with another company that started building watches in Waltham, so they wanted to protect that name, and I think that is the main reason. The town of Waltham had become well known, and the name appeared on all of their watches as the location anyway. Collectors Weekly: Why did they change the name to Waltham? The very best, most expensive Waltham watches for all of that roughly 50-year period, from 1859 until maybe 1915 or so, were always labeled American Watch Co. It had many name changes over the years and a couple of small reorganizations and eventually became the Waltham Watch Company in the early 1900s. was formed, and it’s generally considered to be the first successful company. When the American watch industry first began, the first successful company was called the American Watch Co., and it was founded out of the Boston Watch Company, which had failed in 1859. I specialize in a few different specific types of pocket watches, but my principal interest is in the Waltham Watch Company, and even more specifically in the American Watch Co. I collect precision clocks, clocks that are very accurate timekeepers, and marine chronometers things like that. Pocket watches are a little bit more manageable, and in some ways more interesting, too. I got interested in clocks in 1967, and I started collecting watches fairly seriously in the early ‘80s.
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