Collectors Weekly: Who were some of the major pocket watch manufacturers?
McIntyre: In Switzerland, Geneva is where the headquarters are, but the Le Locle is where the major part of production is. It’s called the Valle de Joux, which is the valley of joy, loosely translated, which is north and east of Geneva. It’s been there for 200 years now.
The English, French, and Swiss didn’t build factories, so there were lots more of them because the individual makers might be producing maybe a hundred watches a year, at the very most maybe 300 or 400 watches a year, and out of a very small shop with maybe three people working at benches. The American factories had hundreds and hundreds of employees in very large factories.
So Waltham was the first, as I said, then Elgin was formed, and then the Illinois Watch Company, and then there were Hampden and Hamilton. So at the peak, I think there were 20 American watch companies. As things tapered off in the 20th century with the Depression and so forth, Hamilton, Elgin, and Waltham were the last three survivors, and Hamilton was the final survivor of all of those.
The Elgin company still makes fancy alloys for some industrial applications, so there’s a little piece of Elgin that’s still alive. The Hamilton people bought one of the Swiss companies and then merged back into a Swiss company. So if you followed all the little pieces around, there may still be a little piece of Hamilton that’s left in the company that’s called Swatch now. Hamilton is really part of Swatch today, and legitimately so.
The Waltham Watch Company was sold off and became a retailing division and a separate manufacturing division called Waltham Precision. Waltham Precision made little clocks for the Air Force to use in airplanes for a long time, but that contract went away around 1993, so they’re finally gone. But the name was bought by a Japanese family who manufactures Waltham watches in Switzerland now, so there are Swiss Waltham watches that follow in the tradition of the original Waltham watches.
The North American rights to the name were bought by a distributor on Long Island and he sells cheap Chinese knockoffs of watches that you see occasionally at Wal-Mart or K-Mart or places like that. So Waltham is pretty much done.
By the 1950s and ‘60s, there were very few pocket watches being made, but the last of the Waltham pocket watches were made in the early ‘50s and the last of the Hamilton watches were made maybe 10 years later.
So by 1965, there were no more pocket watches being made in this country. Timex was still making some pocket watches. General Time was making pocket watches and some of those companies that grew out of the alarm clock business that didn’t have anything to do with the original watch companies. But Westclox did alarm clocks. There were Westclox pocket watches, and those are still around but they’re made in South America now.
The watches America is most famous for are the railroad watches, because we had time standards on our railroads that required lots of people to carry pocket watches in order to make sure that the trains didn’t run into one another.
Collectors Weekly: Did all the major manufacturers make railroad pocket watches?
Model 1861 Fitt's patent 10 size pocket watch case
McIntyre: Most of them did. Technically, people get confused because when you say railroad, they think that if it has a picture with a train on it or if it has a train on the back of the case, it has something to do with railroads. The watch that railroad employees carried was called a standard watch.
A standard watch had a set of operating specs that changed over time, but the final specifications were pretty much set for pocket watches in 1909. The watches that met that specification were made by all the major American companies. So Waltham, Hamilton, Illionis, Elgin, and several other smaller companies all made the same watches. There were probably 15 companies altogether that were making standard watches that conformed to the specifications.
Other than standard pocket watches, there were ladies’ watches. The first ones were made by Waltham in 1860, and they made them in various sizes from that point on. Standard ladies’ watches are about an inch in diameter as opposed to about 2 inches in diameter for a man’s watch and correspondingly lighter.
There were also presentation watches that were very much like railroad watches the same size, but were made to have a better appearance than the railroad watch or to have a heavier gold case or various things of that kind that weren’t really appropriate for the railroad watch.
You can think of the railroad watch as being a tool that somebody used in their job, whereas the bulk of the watches were for people to carry and use for their own pleasure or just to help them in their daily life. A train conductor’s pocket watch was the same as a carpenter’s hammer. Then at the top end were the presentational watches.
So the watches that I collect – the American Watch Co. grade watches from Waltham, the ones that I like the most – are not railroad watches. Most of those are set by the pendant. You pull out on the stem to turn the hand. That was not allowed in the railroad specification. In the railroad specification, you had to set it by pulling out a lever of some kind by a separate mechanism that engaged the setting and then you could set the hand. That was to avoid accidentally moving the hands while winding the watch if you were busy and you were distracted by something else and looking on a train because the worst thing that could happen with a railroad watch was not that it would stop running. It’s that it would keep running but have the wrong time on it. If you were looking at a watch and it was running but was five minutes off, there’s a good chance you could get killed.
Other than the specifics of the railroad watches, the mechanism of watches was essentially the same from around 1820. There was a mechanism called the lever, which is the way that the watch works. There’s a balance wheel you can see spinning back and forth very quickly, and that balance wheel gets its impulse to keep spinning from a little mechanism called a lever and an escape wheel.
Those pieces were invented in the 1770s and took over the industry long before manufactured watches. So that was the preferred way to make a watch for a very long time, and all watches were made that way until 1990 when George Daniels invented the coaxial escapement. Omega has been making coaxial escapement watches for about seven or eight years now. It keeps better time and uses less wear on the various moving parts, so it’s more reliable. It’s partly a marketing gimmick.
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