Collectors Weekly: Does the watch movement determine collectibility?
McIntyre: It does, primarily because of the finish. If the metal is finished very well with rounded edges that are then polished with decoration patterns on the flat surfaces, then those are quality marks that make the movement itself worth more money. Generally, you find those quality marks associated with a fine porcelain dial with very delicate workmanship on it and often in a heavy 18 karat gold case. Those things all come together to contribute to the value of a watch.
In terms of materials, the shafts on all the wheels are made out of steel. The plates themselves are made of some kind of a brass. The most common one is a nickel brass, which is generally called nickel plate. Those are the flat pieces of metal that hold the gears between them. The gears themselves are mostly made out of brass, but occasionally some escape wheels and some other special parts might be made out of steel.
On the earlier very high-grade watches, the gears were made out of gold. You have the gold gears and the steel shafts and the small gears, which are called pinions. If you look at a gear train, you have a little gear and a larger gear, and the big gears are called wheels. Wheels and pinions are both gears, but they have different names.
Then you have the plates, and then you have the jewels. The jewels are generally some kind of hard stone. In the best watches, the jewels are rubies that have been shaped and pierced to make a little bearing surface out of them. Those rubies are held in gold settings to allow you to place them in the nickel plates.
So in the nicest watches, you see ruby jewels in gold settings set in nickel plates. On my website, the 1872 model American-grade watches are generally considered to be the very best of that technique. Those are what most people consider the best watches that were ever made during that high-craft period, anyway.
Collectors Weekly: How many jewels there are in the mechanisms?
The Illinois Watch Co. Bunn Keywind dial
McIntyre: In order to be a jeweled watch at all, there has to be seven jewels. That little fast-spinning wheel called the balance has four jewels on its pivots, and then the lever escapement has three jewels that are critical in the operation of the lever escapement. Those seven jewels make a jeweled watch. After those, all the rest of the jewels are pivot jewels on a shaft that’s turning. You can have as many as 10 more jewels.
There are five shafts on a standard four-wheel watch because there’s the palette and then there’s a shaft for each of the five wheels. That gives you 17 jewels – seven on the balance and escapement and 10 on the train. So 17 jewels is what’s normally called a fully jeweled watch. The center shaft turns so slowly that it’s probably not necessary to jewel that, but many people think it’s important. Either 15 or 17 jewels are all you really need to make the watch operate effectively.
There’s some theoretical argument for putting cap jewels so that when the shafts are turning, if they get to sliding up and down in their bearing surfaces, you put a cap jewel on the end so that they don’t slide very far. They’ll just move a short distance, and then they touch another bearing surface that they can spin on and it’ll keep them from losing any energy.
If you put as many of those cap jewels in a watch as you can reasonably put in, you can get up to 23 jewels, and that’s the standard high-jeweled watch. After that, you have to start putting extra jewels in the winding mechanism and other places where they don’t really do much good. Fifteen is enough, and 23 jewels is the most that it’s reasonable to put on, but a few watches do have more than that.
High-jeweled watches are very collectible because they weren’t made very often. They’re collectible because of their scarcity. The Illinois Watch Company had a number of high-jeweled watches that were made with 24 and 25 jewels and higher. The Columbus Watch Company made a lot of very high-jeweled watches. Seth Thomas Watch Company made some high-jeweled watches. But Waltham and Elgin and Hamilton didn’t make really high-jeweled watches because they didn’t need a gimmick to sell their watches.
The ones that made the high-jeweled watches were the less prominent companies that were trying to compete with something special to try to gain market share. There was a company that only made a very few watches because they never really got in business. That was the McIntyre Watch Company, and their standard watch is 25 jewels. It has extra jewels in the winding mechanism for the little gearing and that show you how much the watch is wound up.
The McIntyre Watch Company was an American company. It was started by Fred McIntyre in Kankakee, Illinois in 1908, and it failed in 1911 and was pretty much out of business by 1913. They made a handful of watches as prototypes and Fred tried to sell those to the jewelry stores and actually succeeded in taking orders for a lot of watches but the people that they were renting factory space from evicted them because they had a better tenant. Somebody wanted to come in and make sewing machines, and so they threw out the watch people and gave the space to the sewing machine people.
McIntyre: There are only three or four of those watches that are known. Some of them belong to Bruce McIntyre, and one belongs to a collector in Chicago who bought it at the sale when the Time Museum was sold a few years ago. Another one was bought by a person in Wellesley, Mass. So there are four of them that are known, and there were probably eight produced, so there are four sleepers out there someplace. Someday I might wander across one at a flea market and somebody will sell it to me for $20.
When I first found out about those watches, I was interested because it had my name on it. I’ve gotten to know the family, the descendants of Fred McIntyre, and we think we are probably cousins but we don’t really know how. We haven’t been able to find a common ancestor.
But a few years back, when the factory went out of business, their drawings and tooling and all of the materials got stored away in Chicago for quite a few years, then was sold to a watch collector here in the Massachusetts area. I bought all that stuff about 10 years ago now. So, technically, I own the McIntyre Watch Company now, but we haven’t produced any watches for a long time. I’ve thought about it but haven’t.
I talk about watches a lot. I’m giving a talk on the McIntyre Watch Company at the NAWCC national meeting in Grand Rapids here in a couple of months. We just released our new NAWCC website today. It’s a lot easier to navigate the website and find things on it today than it was yesterday. It’s much more attractive. The other one was a cobbled together effort of some 15 years ago, and it’s just not been able to keep up with our needs, so we just put a lot of effort into designing that. It should be less intimidating now.
One of the areas that’s listed on the website is the forums, and that’s where the members get together to discuss watches and clocks. There’s a link off of the main page of the website. It just says forums. On the new website, there’s only five entries on the left, so it’s easier to find things. There used to be 30. I’m one of the directors of the NAWCC. We have a national board of directors that provide strategic direction and planning for the organization, and I’m one of the people that does that.
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