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The beginnings of watchmaking in the United States were hampered by a want of metallurgical skills
and raw materials;
watches could scarcely be made out of wood, as were some of the earliest American
clocks. Many early ‘watchmakers’
imported movements from England. By 1859, however, the American
Watch Company (afterwards Waltham), with
Aaron Dennison as technical supervisor, was producing
watches of a type already distinctive (based on Liverpool
full-plates but without fusees),
using efficient machine-based methods inspired partly by Swiss models and partly by
recent innovations
in American small-arms manufacture. Several more substantial manufacturers, such as Elgin,
Adams
& Perry (afterwards Hamilton), E. Howard, the Illinois and New York companies, and Cornell in far-off
San
Francisco, opened their factories between 1858 and 1875. By 1900 the stringent and specific
demands of the great
railway companies were shaping the nature of the railroad watch, and the
largest firms were producing hundreds of
thousands of watches annually.
American
watch design tended to be advanced but not innovative; few new or unfamiliar devices appeared (the cheap
Waterbury company's astonishing flirtation with the duplex escapement in the 1880s is an exception),
but it was
America which transplanted such things as overcoil hairsprings, compensated balances
and the general jewelling of
train wheels from the realm of the exotic to that of the commonplace.
In appearance, watches of 18 size or larger (see
American gauge) were often full-plates until
after 1900, while smaller calibres adopted a compromise barred design with
each bridge locating
several wheels instead of only one — a pattern which became almost universal in the wrist-watch
age.
Typical of the U.S.A. is the use of grade-names; in addition to or instead of the manufacturer,
a watch might be
marked with the name of a company director or supporter (Waltham's ‘P. S. Bartlett’,
Elgin's ‘B. W. Raymond’), a
descriptive or patriotic phrase (‘Ladies' Stem Wind’, ‘Native Son’) or
the name of a historical character (New York's ‘John
Hancock’, Hampden's ‘Molly Stark’). A single
model (for the U. S. manufacturers also adopted model designations)
might come in several different
grades each distinguished by an individual name.
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