Thus was discovered the principle of the pendulum and its

"isochronism." By "isochronism" we mean _inequal arcs in equal time_.

In other words, any swinging body, such as a pendulum, is said to be

"isochronous" when it describes long or short arcs in equal lengths

of time. This also applies to a balance-wheel, and hair-spring. And

herein lies a remarkable fact—this epoch-making discovery was after

all but a rediscovery. The isochronism of a swinging body was known in

Babylon thousands of years before, although the Babylonians, of course,

could not explain it. Lacking in application, it had passed from the

minds of men, and it remained for Galileo to observe the long-forgotten

fact and to work out its mechanical application. He did not himself

apply this principle to clock-making, although some fifty years later,

toward the end of his life, he did suggest such an application.

The first pendulum clocks were probably made about 1665, by Christian

Huyghens, the celebrated Dutch astronomer and mathematician who

discovered the rings of Saturn; and by the English inventor, Doctor

Robert Hooke. The invention is claimed for several other men in England

and abroad at about the same time; but hardly upon sufficient authority.

From that time on, the important improvements of clockwork were chiefly

made in two directions—those of the mechanical perfection of the

escapement and the compensation for changes of temperature.

There is a little world of invention and discovery behind the face of

the clock which beats so steadily on your mantel. Look within if you

will, and see the compact mechanism with its toothed gears, its coiled

spring, or its swinging pendulum, in which the motion of the cathedral

lamp is harnessed for your service,—nothing in that grouping has merely

happened so. You may or may not understand all the action of its parts,

or the technical names of them; but each feature in the structure has

been the result of study and experiment, as when Huyghens hung the

pendulum from a separate point and connected it with a forked crank

astride the pendulum shaft. You can see that forked crank to this day,

if you care to look; it was the product of good Dutch brains.

Next we come to one of the greatest single improvements in clock-work,

and the chief difference between the mechanism made by de Vick and the

better ones of our own time. When the pallets in a clock are forced by

an increased swing of the pendulum or by the form of the pallet faces

against the teeth of the escape-wheel in the direction opposite to

that in which the wheel is moving, the wheel must be pushed backward

a little way each time, and the whole clock action is made to back up

a little. You can see that this would tend to interfere with good and

regular timekeeping. George Graham, in London, in 1690 corrected this

error by inventing the _dead-beat escapement_ which rather contradicted

its name by working very well and faithfully.

There are many forms of this escapement and there is no need to explain

it in detail. But the main idea is this: At the end of each vibration

or swing of the pendulum, the escape-teeth, instead of being made to

recoil by the downward motion of the pallets, simply remains stationary

or at rest until the commencement of the return swing of the pendulum.

This was brought about by applying certain curves to the acting faces

of the pallets. But the acting faces of both tooth and pallet are

beveled, so that the tooth in slipping by gives the pallet a "kick"

or impulse outward and keeps it in motion. Nowadays, even a common

alarm-clock has an escapement working in this way.

Then came another remarkably interesting contribution. Have you

ever wondered why the pendulums of fine clocks were weighted with

a _gridiron_ of alternate rods of brass and steel? For purpose of

ornament? Not at all—it constitutes a scientific solution of an

embarrasing problem, due to the inevitable variations in temperature.

Metals expand with heat and contract with cold. Notched iron bars

can be made to "crawl" along a flat surface by alternately heating

and cooling them. Bridge-builders sometimes arrange sliding points,

or rocking points to adjust the differences in the length of the

steel. Contraction and expansion are important factors in all their

calculations. But a pendulum would change its rate of motion if it

changed its length and this would interfere with its accuracy as a

measurer of time. Graham worked upon this problem, too, and attached a

jar of mercury to the rod of his pendulum for a weight. When the heat

lengthened the rod, it also caused the mercury to rise, just as in a

thermometer, and this left the "working-length" the same.

Such mercury-weighted pendulums are not uncommon to this day, but the

more familiar _gridiron_ came from the brain of John Harrison, who, in

1726, fixed the alternate rods in such a way that the expanding brass

rods raised the weight as much as the expanding steel rods lowered it.

Thus they neutralized each other.

The clock as we know it was now virtually complete. There were

structural refinements, but no more radical improvements to be made. In

tracing its development from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century,

we note one curious likeness to the ancient history of recorded time.

In this case, as before in Babylon, the people first concerned with the

science were the priests, and after them the astronomers, but we note a

still more important difference.

As the medieval passed into the modern, the practise of horology passed

more and more out of the hands of scientists into the keeping of

commercial workmen. The custodian of time was at first a priest, and

finally a manufacturer. And this change was attended by a vast increase

in the general use of timepieces, and the correspondingly greater

influence of time upon society and men's way of living. The Middle Ages

made clocks and watches; and clocks and watches make the age in which

we live.

CHAPTER EIGHT

_The Watch that Was Hatched from the "Nuremburg Egg"_

In the second act of Shakespeare's play, _As You Like It_, when

Touchstone, the fool, meets Jaques, the sage, he draws forth a sun-dial

from his pocket and begins to moralize upon Time.

Touchstone's dial must have looked like a napkin-ring, with a stem like

that of a watch, by which to hold it up edgewise toward the sun, and a

tiny hole in the upper part of the ring through which a little sunbeam

could fall upon the inner surface whereon the hours were marked. This

pinhole was perhaps pierced through a slide, which could be adjusted

up or down according to the sun's position at the time of year. In

principle, therefore, it was a miniature of the huge dial of Ahaz of

more than two thousand years before.

In another Shakespeare play, _Twelfth Night_, Malvolio is gloating

in imagination over his coming luxury when he shall have married the

heiress and entered upon a life of wealth and leisure.

"I frown the while," says he; "and perchance wind up my watch, or play

with my—some rich jewel."

There, in those two quotations, we have the whole meaning of the watch

in the time of Queen Elizabeth. Touchstone's dial was a practical

convenience—a thing to tell the time. Malvolio's watch was a piece of

jewelry, an ornament indicating wealth and splendor. While watches had

been well known for many years, people wore them chiefly for display

and told time by means of pocket sun-dials.

For the first watches we must go back to about the year 1500, shortly

after America had been discovered, and when the great tower-clocks

of de Vick and Lightfoot were not much more than a century old. In

the quaint old town of Nuremberg there lived, at that time, one Peter

Henlein, probably a locksmith. But a locksmith, in those days, would be

an expert mechanic—more like a modern toolmaker; very likely an armorer

also; capable of that fine workmanship in metal which we still wonder

at in our museums. Nuremberg was then very much a medieval city, all

red-tiled roofs and queer windows, where people went about dressed in

trunks and jerkins and pointed caps and pointed shoes. It looked like

_Die Meistersinger_, and _Grimm's Fairy Tales_, and pictures by Howard

Pyle and Maxfield Parrish; very much like "Spotless Town," except that

it was far from spotless.

Now, as you remember, there was not until long after this any means

of making clocks keep anything like accurate time; so, instead of

improving them, people competed with each other in devising novel and

ingenious forms. There could be no more desirable novelty than a clock

small enough to stand upon a desk or table, or even to be carried

around. Such a clock could not well be driven by weights. But Peter

Henlein overcame that difficulty by using for the motive power a coiled

mainspring wound up with a ratchet, just as we still do to-day.

There is some dispute over attributing to Henlein the credit for this

invention; but at least he did the thing, and it cannot be proved that

anybody did it before him. "Every day," wrote Johannes Coeuleus, in

1511, "produces more ingenious inventions. A clever and comparatively

young man—Peter Henlein—creates works that are the admiration of

leading mathematicians, for, out of a little iron he constructs clocks

with numerous wheels, which, without any impulse and in any position,

indicate time for forty hours and strike, and which can be carried in

the purse as well as in the pocket."

[Illustration: THE FIRST POCKET TIME PIECE

_In Shakespear's play, "As You Like It," Touchstone, the Fool, draws

forth a pocket sun dial, which probably was of the "napkin ring" type._]

There was, however, no invention of any such thing as we mean by the

term _watch_ to-day that came complete from the mind of any one man,

but the contrivance gradually grew, in shape and structure out of the

small clock which could be worn at the belt or on a chain round the

neck. It came to be called a _watch_ because _clock_ meant a bell

that struck the hours. But many of the first watches had striking

apparatus, and this circumstance added to the confusion of names. We

slangily call a fat, old-fashioned watch a _turnip_; but the first

watches were very much fatter and more old-fashioned, and might fairly

have deserved the name. Before long, Henlein was making them oval in

shape. Hence, they were called _Nuremberg eggs_.

Here, then, is something which we can really consider a watch. Let us

see how it compares with those that we know to-day. In the first place,

being egg-shaped, it was thick and heavy—you would not like to carry it

in your pocket. It had no crystal and only one hand—the hour-hand. So

much for the outside.

Inside, the difference was still greater. The works were made of iron

and put together with pins and rivets. It was all hand-work—expert

workmanship, indeed—but look at the works of your own watch and try

to imagine cutting the teeth in those tiny gears, or making those

delicate springs with files and hammers. As pieces of hand-workmanship,

therefore, the watches made by Henlein and his followers were

remarkable; but when compared with our modern watches, they were crude

and clumsy affairs.

Furthermore, they were poor timekeepers. They had the old foliot

balance running parallel to the dial. This was all very well as long as

the watch lay on the table with the balance swinging horizontally. But

as soon as it was carried, in a perpendicular position, the arms of

the balance had to swing up and down, which was quite another matter.

And then, of course, the crudeness of the works produced a great deal

of friction. This made it necessary to use a very stiff mainspring,

otherwise the watch would not run at all. Such a spring exercised more

pressure when fully wound than when it was nearly run down. And so

the worst fault of the foliot was that it speeded up under increased

pressure.

The first improvements, and, in fact, the only ones for nearly two

hundred years, were directed toward doing away with the unequal

pressure of the mainspring and thus make the watch keep better time.

If you look into the back of a very early watch, you may see a curious

device consisting of a curved arm ending in a pinion, which travels

round an eccentric gear of peculiar shape. This is the first type of

equalizing mechanism; it was invented in Peter Henlein's time and was

called the _stackfreed_; but it was a clumsy device at best and a great

waste of power. Therefore it was gradually displaced by the _fusee_.

Perhaps one might have felt a certain amount of pride in carrying about

such a thick, bulging mechanical toy, as were these early watches,

but, as to possessing something that would keep correct time—that was

a different matter. After admiring it and listening to its ticking,

one would have to guess as to just how far wrong it might be. People

did not figure closely on minutes and half minutes in the day of the

_Nuremberg egg_; there was no "Wall Street" and no commuting. And this

brings us to a real event in the whole story.

Jacob Zech, a Swiss mechanic, living at Prague in Bohemia, Austria,

about 1525, began studying the problem of the equalization of watch

mechanism. He was sure that there ought to be some better means than

that of the clumsy stackfreed. Presently he hit upon the principle of

the fusee, and Gruet, another Swiss, perfected it. At last it became

possible to make a watch that would not run fast when first wound and

then go more and more slowly as it ran down—and to do this in a really

practical way. Before this time, a watch was a clumsy piece of ticking

jewelry; now it became something of a real time-keeper. Therefore, it

was not long before people began to want Swiss watches. These were the

days when skilful Swiss craftsmen worked patiently in their little home

shops, making some single watch-part and making it extremely well,

while the so-called "manufacturer" bought up these separate parts, and

assembled them into watches.

What was the fusee that brought about such a change? Not much to look

at, surely—merely a short cone with a spiral groove running about it,

and a cord, or chain, wound in this groove and fastened at the large

end of the core. Its principle and its action were very simple, and

that is why it was a great invention. Some one has said that anyone

can invent a complicated machine to do a piece of work, but it takes

real brains to make a _simple_ machine _that will do the same work_.

[Illustration: _Stackfreed_

_Mainspring Barrel and Fusee_]

The shaft of the fusee was attached to the great wheel which drove the

gears, and the other end of the cord was fastened to the mainspring

barrel. This is the way in which it worked: The mainspring slowly

turned the barrel; this gradually unwound the cord from the fusee and

caused the fusee to turn. When the fusee turned, the wheels also were

forced to turn, and the watch was running. At the start, the cord

would unwind from the small end where the leverage was least, but as

the tension of the mainspring grew slowly less, the leverage of the

cord grew slowly greater and, consequently, the power applied to the

wheels was always of the same degree of strength. This invention gave a

great impulse to Swiss watchmaking; several centuries later it worked

to the disadvantage of English manufacturers, for they continued to

use it after other countries had found still better methods of power

equalization.

The fusee was invented about the year 1525, at a time when the world

was fairly alive with new ideas. People in Europe were just beginning

to realize that they were living on a sphere and not upon a flat

surface, and that there was a vast new land on the other side of the

ocean. Columbus had crossed the Atlantic but a few years before and now

explorers were making new voyages of discovery in every direction.

Printing, invented by Gutenberg, about a century before, was becoming

common enough to be a real power in the world, bringing the thoughts

of men before the eyes of thousands without the slow and expensive

process of hand-copying. The first printed copy of the Bible had made

its appearance and Caxton had set up his first printing-press—all

within the lifetime of people then living—and printing shops were being

established in many places. Many people were learning to read—a thing

that could be said of very few in the Middle Ages. They were finding

out something about the wonderful forgotten civilization of ancient

times. Everywhere people's minds were stirring. We call it the time

of the _Renaissance_, or the _rebirth_ of civilization, but in some

respects it was more like the awakening of the world after a long

sleep. Just as a person on waking looks first at his clock or watch,

so now the world, preparing to be busy and modern, needed some better

means of telling time. It therefore was both natural and necessary that

the watch should have received such a great improvement as the fusee at

just this period.

Then began the age of those strange, ingenious watches which we

still find in the museums. For some time, there were only a few real

improvements. Screws and brass wheels were introduced into their

construction about 1550, and glass crystals about 1600. The minute-hand

appeared occasionally; but it was not in common use for nearly a

century afterward. And that shows how watches were regarded in those

days. One would think that such an obvious advantage as that of

minute-notation would have been seized upon and utilized at once; on

the contrary, people did not seem to care much about it. What was the

use of a hand to mark the minutes, when the watch was more likely than

not to be half an hour or so in error?

For real timekeeping there were dials everywhere, and there were also

fairly good clocks in the towers; at night, watchmen patrolled the

streets and called out the hours. These watchmen were the police of

the period; it was part of their duty to call out the time, just as

the modern police direct people upon the way they wish to go. For

timekeeping, the watch was still less useful than the watchman. Made

entirely by hand, it was necessarily expensive; therefore, it was made

regardless of expense. It was thought of as Malvolio thought of it—a

possession showing the wealth and station of the wearer, a rich jewel,

a toy for noblemen and for kings. Centuries were to pass before real

watches were within the reach of common people.

It is said that Edward VI was the first Englishman to possess a watch.

This young king, who reigned so short a time, will be remembered by

many as the young prince in Mark Twain's famous story _The Prince

and the Pauper_. Mary Queen of Scots had a small watch shaped like a

skull—a cheerful fashion of the time. Many others were shaped in the

form of insects, flowers, animals, and various other objects. Even

to-day the Swiss make many watches of curious form.

Queen Elizabeth and her court selected watches as modern women do

their hats—to match their various costumes. These watches were usually

worn on a chain or ribbon round the neck and were largely for display.

Several outside cases were often supplied with watches of that period,

and they were made to fit on over that which held the works; these were

variously ornamented with jewels, tortoise-shell and intricate pierced

work in gold, almost as delicate as lace. The covers were decorated

with miniature paintings, some of which were very beautiful.

Strangely enough, it was this practise of decorating watches that

later gave us our plain white enameled dials, because enamel was the

best material on which to paint delicately. To the average museum

visitor, the interest in any collection of old watches, aside from

their historic association, lies in their marvelously ornamented cases

rather than in their mechanism. And in this he very closely repeats the

feeling of their original makers or owners; it was more important to

follow fashion than to know the time.

This custom of watch-decoration continued more or less through the

eighteenth century, and even into the nineteenth, although, by that

time, watches had, as we shall see, become excellent timepieces. The

story is told that when Dresden was captured by the Prussians in 1757,

they found in the wardrobe of Count Bruhl, the Saxon Minister, a

different suit of clothes for every day in the year; each had a watch,

stick, and snuff-box, appropriately decorated, as part of each one.

Shakespeare never regarded a watch seriously. In _Love's Labour's Lost_

he compares a woman to

_A German clock,

Still a-repairing, ever out of frame,

And never going aright, being a watch—_

A century after Shakespeare's day, Doctor Johnson remarked that a

dictionary was like a watch: "The worst is better than none, and the

best cannot be expected to go quite true." And Pope says in the same

vein:

_'Tis with our judgments as our watches—none

Go just alike, yet each believes his own._

[Illustration: THE "NUREMBURG EGG," THE FIRST REAL WATCH

_"Out of a little iron, Peter Henlein constructs clocks which ... can

be carried in the pocket."—so wrote Johannes Coeleus, in 1511._]

All of this reminds one of Dickens' famous character, Cap'n Cuttle,

whose watch was evidently of the old school. Readers of _Dombey and

Son_ may remember how "the Captain drew Walter into a corner, and with

a great effort, that made his face very red, pulled up the silver

watch, which was so big and so tight in his pocket that it came out

like a bung. "Wal'r," said the Captain, handing it over and shaking him

heartily by the hand, "a parting gift, my lad. Put it back half an hour

every morning and another quarter toward afternoon and it's a watch

that'll do you credit.""

The old idea of regarding the watch as a trinket rather than as

a timepiece, as an expensive toy rather than as an accurate and

necessary mechanism, has come down to us from the days when a watch

was ornamented outside, because it could not be really useful within.

Even now, in spite of the modern demand for accurate timekeeping, that

attitude has not entirely died away, as is shown by the expression

"gold watch" and "silver watch." Of course, there are really no such

things; there are merely gold and silver _cases_ for _steel_, _brass_

and _nickel_ watches. Some people still continue this mistaken idea

by thinking of a watch merely as jewelry, as a thing meant more for

ornament than for use.

CHAPTER NINE

_How a Mechanical Toy Became a Scientific Timepiece_

Now, since we are at last well into the story of the watch, let us

glance back over the road we have traveled. We have seen man first

beginning to think of time by noting the positions of shadows or the

motions of the stars. Next, we have seen him making his plans for days

ahead by means of the changes in the moon, then by making such division

in the flow of time as the month, the season, and the year. We have

seen him growing out of his savage isolated life in caves and forests

and forming tribes and settlements, and have seen him coming out of the

darkness of those early ages into Mesopotamia, the Land Between the

Rivers, where our first written history seems to begin.

Here, with great cities, temples, and a high degree of civilization and

culture, we have found priests studying the stars and making sun-dials

and clepsydræ in order to tell the time by shadows, sunbeams, or the

dropping of water. We have taken a glimpse at the wonderful people of

Greece and Rome, and have seen how, as they became more cultured, they

found it necessary to have more accurate means of telling time. We

have considered the advantages and disadvantages of the sand-glass,

have found clumsy pieces of clock-work in church towers, getting their

running power from weights, in order to strike the bells, and have

stood with young Galileo in the Cathedral at Pisa, when a swinging lamp

gave him the idea of the pendulum.

Lastly, we have seen the making of smaller clocks—that were made

smaller and smaller until they could be carried as watches, in which

springs were used instead of weights. Following this, it has been

merely a question of improvement, as one inventor after another has hit

upon some idea that would do away with this or that difficulty.

Thus we have come, in the time of Shakespeare, to a clever little

contrivance that ticked beautifully but registered time rather badly;

that took a long while to manufacture by hand, and cost so much that

only the rich could afford to buy it, and that, in consequence, people

were proud to own, but did not take seriously as a timepiece.

In all this journey, covering thousands of years, one thing has made

itself clear to us—the story of timepieces is not a mere mechanical

story; it is a human story. Men did not put together certain pieces of

wood or metal in order merely to make mechanism, but to meet a vital

need. One might almost say that the story of the watch is in the watch

itself. The works run and the hands move because of the mainspring,

which by pressing steadily forces them into motion. In very much the

same way, the busy brains of the inventors and the busy hands of the

workmen have been kept active because advancing civilization has been

like a great mainspring, always pressing upon larger affairs and

greater numbers of people, always needing to fit its engagements more

and more closely together, and always calling for better and better

means for telling time. Thus, if the watch in the days of Shakespeare

and Queen Elizabeth was still an inaccurate timepiece, its improvement

was a foregone conclusion. Brains and hands were still active;

civilization was still pressing.

It is said that a hog helped in the next development; he helped

quite unconsciously by furnishing a bristle. In order to understand

this, we must remember Galileo's swinging lamp and the pendulum that

the Englishman, Hooke, and the Hollander, Huyghens, applied in the

making of clocks. It will be recalled that a pendulum swings in arcs

of different lengths in exactly the same time and that this property

is called _isochronism_. Both Hooke and Huyghens could see that the

application of isochronism would be quite as valuable in a watch as in

a clock, but they realized that this could not be accomplished by means

of the pendulum. Therefore, each began to experiment, and each seems to

have hit upon the same idea as a substitute for the pendulum in about

the year 1665.

This is where the hog's bristle came into use. One end was made fast

while the other was bent back and forth by the balance, as it swung

to and fro. Being short and stiff, it acted as a spring; in fact, its

motion was something like the swing of a small pendulum, and some

people incorrectly claim that the name of _hair-spring_ first came from

this use of a hair. Of course, a very fine steel was soon substituted

for the bristle. Next, it was realized that there would be an advantage

if a much longer spring were used, and obviously the only way in which

this could be done was by making it in the form of a coil, and so

we have the delicate, coiled hair-spring, as it is found in our own

watches to-day.

The principle of the hair-spring is not unlike that of the pendulum:

the farther the pendulum is swung out from the lowest point of its arc,

the greater is the force that gets it back; and the farther a spring is

bent from its position of rest, the greater is the force exerted to get

it back. With both of these devices it is possible to obtain regular

beats and steady motion.

It is hard to realize that nearly a hundred years must have passed by

before the hair-spring came into common use. To-day any new device

is described in catalogs, written up in the papers, manufactured in

quantities and is quickly carried by travelers into every country,

but in those days everything was still made by hand, piece by piece,

and there was comparatively little travel that would admit of its

distribution. Ideas made their way very slowly. In fact, Julien Le

Roy rediscovered the principle of isochronism and announced it with a

good deal of pride, quite ignorant of the fact that Hooke and Huyghens

explained it nearly a century before. And so the hair-spring was slowly

adopted by English watchmakers with a number of minor improvements.

Other inventors, of whom presently we shall hear more, worked out

better methods of escapement, and the watch movement developed

slowly toward its present form. It became possible to tell time more

accurately and to make arrangements and plans more closely as the watch

became a better time-keeper. The pace of life was speeding up, and

people were realizing the value of minutes—even of seconds. Therefore

the minute- and second-hands were added to the hour-hand that so long

had moved alone around the watch-dial. And in 1704, Nicholas Facio, a

Swiss doing business in London, introduced jeweled bearings into the

mechanism.

The importance of jewels is often misunderstood even at the present

day. Many people do not know why jewels are used in a watch, assuming

that they are intended for ornament or in some way to increase the

value. But most of the jewels in a watch-movement are placed out of

sight; and, although they often consist of real rubies or sapphires,

they are so tiny and their intrinsic value so small that no watch

requires more than one dollar's worth of jewels. They are strictly

utilitarian in their purpose. A pivot or bearing, running in a hole

drilled in a jewel, creates almost no friction and requires so little

oil that a single drop as big as a pinhead is enough for an entire

watch. Because jewels are so hard and smooth, a watch with jeweled

bearings runs better and wears less and requires less power to drive

it, than one in which they are lacking.

During all the time recounted, the great mainspring of civilization had

been pressing, ever pressing. Nothing could be considered "good enough"

if a way could be found to improve it.

At last an improvement came out of the sea. Travel had been reaching

out in every direction; ships were fitted out by scores to take goods

from England or the continent of Europe to lands across the seas and to

bring back the products of these countries.

The time had been, but a few generations earlier, when people had stood

on the shores of the ocean and had wondered what might lie beyond

their sight. That water stretched out to the "edge of the world" they

felt sure, but what there happened to it they could not tell. Surely,

however, it must be peopled with monsters and demons. It was foolhardy

to venture too far from land. We can hardly realize what a piece of

insane rashness it must have seemed to most people when Columbus

sailed out boldly into this vast mystery, nor how the world was

thrilled when he brought back word of strange lands and strange peoples

he had found beyond the horizon.

But by the time now reached in our story the oceans had become highways

of trade, and men were beginning to draw those strange, crude maps of

the continents, which make us smile until we stop to think how maps

might have looked had they been left for us to make. At all events, the

problems involved in navigation were being much discussed in every land.

One of the greatest of these problems was to discover the whereabouts

of the ship at any given time. When one is out of sight of land the

sense of location necessarily becomes inoperative; one wave looks like

another, and there are winds and currents which might carry a ship

hundreds of miles out of its course unless there were some way of

knowing its true position. At first, the stars, and later the compass

gave help in giving _direction_ but not in showing _position_. How

might this be done? There was no possible way in which the element of

telling time did not enter.

[Illustration: Table Watch in Drum-Shaped Case, Nuremburg, before 1560

One of the Oldest Watches in Existence

Table Clock by Bartholomew Newsom London, 1565

Enormous Repeater Watch Newsom, London, 1565

Large Brass Table Clock Dutch, Seventeenth Century

FIRST FORMS OF THE WATCH

_Types of table clocks and two of the oldest watches in existence In

the collections of the Metropolitan Museum._]

That sounds a bit strange until one stops to think of the rotation of

the earth once in twenty-four hours. If one could travel around the

earth, from east to west, at a uniform rate in exactly twenty-four

hours, he would find clocks and watches indicating the exact minute

he started at every step of his journey; and the sun would remain

steadily at the same height above the horizon, if he always kept to one

parallel of latitude. His rate of speed would have to be about eighteen

miles a minute, if he chose to travel along the equator, or to state

this same thing in another way, when it is noon in New York, it is 11

A. M. in Chicago, 10 A. M. in Denver and 9 A. M. in San Francisco; it

is also 1 P. M. several hundred miles out into the Atlantic; 2 P. M.

still farther out; 5 P. M. in London; and so on. In other words, it is

some one of all the moments of the twenty-four-hour day at the _same

time_, but _the time that indicates each of these moments is different

at different points_. Therefore, if you could find out the time at any

point, and could compare it with the time at the place you had left,

you would know just how far east or west you had come, but not how far

north or south.

Ascertaining the time was not difficult; at noon it would be shown by

the sun. Nor was it difficult to compare the time provided one had an

_accurate_ timepiece, but a watch that ran either fast or slow might

mislead one by hundreds of miles. You can see how important it was that

navigators have some means of _exactly_ measuring time. This was one

of the points at which the great mainspring of civilization pressed

hardest upon the brains of inventors and the hands of workmen.

So, from the sixteenth century onward, the leading governments of

Europe offered large rewards for a chronometer sufficiently accurate

to determine longitude at sea. In England, Parliament offered twenty

thousand pounds, or one hundred thousand dollars, for a time-keeper

which, throughout a voyage to the West Indies, would give the longitude

within thirty miles. This meant that it must keep time within a minute

a month, or two seconds a day. Both Huyghens and Hooke somewhat naively

attempted to make a pendulum clock keep time at sea; but imagine the

action of a pendulum while a ship was rolling and tossing!

The problem was really one for the watchmaker, since a clock is made

for keeping time while standing in one position and a watch for

keeping time while being moved about. John Harrison, the inventor of

the famous _gridiron_ pendulum, finally won the munificent prize. In

1762, after several trials and failures, he succeeded in producing a

timepiece which varied, under test, only a minute and four seconds

during a voyage of some five months. This was excellent timekeeping—far

within half a second a day; it made it possible for a captain at sea

to determine his position within eighteen miles. Harrison's mechanism

was too complicated for description in these pages. Indeed, it was so

difficult of comprehension that, before paying him his reward, the

English government asked Harrison to write a book of explanation in

order that his inventions might be copied by other makers. He did so

and finally received the money. Harrison's ideas have now been greatly

simplified, but, in general, his plan is used in the making of marine

chronometers to this day; thus, in a sense, it is due to Harrison's

brain that our great ships are able to cross the ocean on almost

schedule time.

Both the first success of the chronometer and the later efforts toward

improving it had a great influence upon the next few generations of

watchmakers; the final improvements were made in the days of the

American Revolution. It was at this latter period that a man named

Thomas Mudge worked out the kind of escapement that is still used in

our watches. A little later, the Swiss-Parisian, Abraham Louis Breguét,

improved the hair-spring by bending its outer coil across the others to

their center and fastening it at that point in order that the spiral of

the spring should expand equally in all directions from the center.

The last development of importance consisted in doing away with the

fusee. The faults of this device had been the need of a thick watch to

give it room, and the danger that a broken mainspring might destroy

other parts of the movement in its recoil. French and Swiss watchmakers

reduced the friction until it needed very little power to run the

mechanism, and then were able to employ a mainspring which was not

stiff enough to require a fusee. American makers adopted this idea, but

the British clung to the fusee and the stiff spring; it has cost them

much of their prestige as watchmakers and much of their trade.

Thus, the mechanism of both clocks and watches was practically in its

present state by the year 1800. The "grandfather's clock" of that

date may look old-fashioned, but it tells time a modern way, and

the mechanical ideas in George Washington's watch were not so very

different from those which we find in our own. There have been many

small improvements since, but the great inventions had all been made.

It is interesting to remember that most of these inventions are due

to the English artisans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,

although in delicate workmanship and beautiful decoration, they were

equaled and perhaps excelled by the Swiss and by the French. The work

of producing a satisfactory timekeeping machine, begun by priests and

by astronomers, and carried forward by the demands of the navigator and

the patient labor of the craftsman, had ended after thousands of years,

in triumph. The ticking contrivance of wheels, levers, and springs was

no longer a mechanical toy; it was a marvelous instrument which was

made by man with his head and hands and yet was almost as accurate in

its action as the sun and stars themselves.

Here ends the first great division of our story. The scientific problem

had been solved; what remained was to democratize the keeping of time;

to place mechanism equal to the best of those days within the reach

and within the means of every man. In this later development the work

was to pass out of the hands of artists and inventors into those of

manufacturers. Its history from this point on is no longer a record of

science but a romance of industry.

CHAPTER TEN

_The "Worshipful Company" and English Watchmaking_

From the beginning, there are two sides to the history of timekeeping.

The first is the story of discovery and invention—how men labored for

thousands of years to produce a contrivance that would really tell the

time. But if only a few such machines existed in the world, it would be

of very little use to humanity in general, however perfect each might

be. Accordingly history must now recount how clocks and watches came to

be made in sufficiently large numbers and at sufficiently low cost to

be within the reach of all who needed them.

The turning-point from the inventive to the industrial side of the

development was reached about the year 1800. Timekeeping has always

been a part of history, and history a part of timekeeping, and this

opening of the nineteenth century was a period when history itself

was changing, for the progress of civilization is like a journey over

a mountain road; one must needs turn occasionally or one can rise no

higher. The American Revolution had ended but a few years before,

and the thinly settled states were trying the strange experiment of

having the people govern themselves without a king. In the old world,

the people of France had suddenly risen up and seized the power from

_their_ king, and a bloody struggle had ensued in which many of the

old nobility had been beheaded. In England, the power of the throne

was growing less and the power of the people greater. In fact, the

whole world was becoming more and more filled with democratic ideas and

ideals than ever before.

Now, this same democratic idea that set up republics was getting ready

to put a watch into every man's pocket. At first, everyone had told

the time for himself, and had told it badly. Now, after thousands of

years, it had come about that a few had the means of telling time

accurately. The great inventors mentioned in the last few chapters had

contributed one idea after another, until, among them all they had

worked out clocks and watches that would keep correct time. But these

timepieces were not yet convenient in form, and they certainly were not

yet convenient in price for the average man. They still were made by

hand in small quantities, and such a condition would have to be changed

before it would be possible for _everyone_ to tell the time and to

_tell it well_.

Naturally, the industrial and business development of watchmaking began

long before 1800, long before, indeed, the time at which the inventions

were all complete. For centuries the two sides of the story, the

inventive and the industrial, had progressed side by side, but for the

sake of clearness, we have described the inventions first. Now we must

glance back again to the time of Shakespeare, when the period of modern

inventions was just beginning, in order to see how the _business_ side

of watchmaking started upon its growth.

Four nations have been concerned in this development—England, France,

Switzerland, and the United States. The English worked in one way;

the French worked in another; the Swiss, in still another; while the

Americans took up the final organization of the work in a manner that

was thoroughly typical of their peculiar genius.

The mechanical improvements and inventions were mostly made, as we

know, by the English. But for the beginnings of the watch industry

in England one must go back to a time before the days of Hooke

and Huyghens, to the year 1627, the year of incorporation of the

_Worshipful Clock-makers, Company_. Imagine such a name being chosen

to-day! The Worshipful Clock-makers' Company was the original

trade-organization of the business in England. It was not at all like

our modern companies but was one of those great trade "guilds" which

played such an important part in the development of European industry.

[Illustration:

London about 1600

Octagonal Rock Crystal Watch French, 1560-90

Square French Watch Late Sixteenth Century

Oval French Watch 1590

Shell Shaped Rock Crystal Watch French

Cross Shaped Rock Crystal Watch French

Book Shaped Swiss Watch 1560-1600

WHEN WATCHES WERE JEWELS

_Watches of the Sixteenth Century, with but one hand, and pierced metal

or rock crystal cases. In the collections of the Metropolitan Museum._ ]

People sometimes think of the medieval trade-guild as something like

the modern trade-union, but this is a mistake; it was in many ways

quite different. Perhaps one might call it a sort of a cross between

a labor-union and a manufacturing trust. Within a certain district,

all who were occupied in a particular business were required to

belong to the guild; otherwise they were not allowed to do business,

and the "district" might include the whole country. In order to gain

an idea of a guild, imagine in this country a single association of

jewelers to which everyone connected with the jewelry business was

forced to belong, whether he were manufacturer or retailer, employer,

or employee, the head of his firm or the last new clerk behind the

counter. Or, to look at it in another way, imagine a trust controlling

the whole industry and a union including all the workmen under a

closed-shop system, and then suppose that the trust and the union were

one and the same. That would be like one of the great medieval guilds.

It was easy for such an organization to create a monopoly of the entire

national product.

Sometimes the guild would forbid the importation of foreign goods and

would not permit workmen to come from other countries. It usually

regulated, to some extent, the conditions of wages and labor. It fixed

its own standards of quality of the product; if goods did not come up

to this standard, they might not be sold, and the rules of the guild

had practically the force of law. But it did not attempt to control

prices, nor to limit the quantity of production, nor to interfere,

except very indirectly, with free competition among its own members.

Thus, it was not, in our modern sense of the conception, a company at

all, but an association of independent manufacturers or tradesmen,

each in business for himself, each in competition with his fellow

craftsmen, and all kept upon a tolerably even footing by limiting

the amount of labor that each one might employ. Its members were the

master craftsmen, each the head of his own house; through them were

associated the journeymen, or skilled workmen in their employ, and the

apprentices. These latter might rise to be masters, in business for

themselves. But no one without such a connection could engage in the

business at all, in any capacity whatever.

The Worshipful Clock-makers' Company, under its charter granted

by Charles I, had the power to make rules for the government of

all persons following the trade within ten miles of London, and

for regulating the trade throughout the kingdom. Its first master,

or president, was David Ramsay, who was mentioned as having been

"constructor of horologes to His Most Sacred Majesty, James I," and

is one of the characters in Scott's novel "_The Fortunes of Nigel_."

Its wardens or executives were Henry Archer, John Willowe, and Sampson

Shelton; and there was, besides, a fellowship, or board of directors.

The company proceeded at once to forbid all persons "making, buying,

selling, transporting, and importing any bad, deceitful clocks,

watches, larums, sun-dials or cases for the said trade," and full power

to search for, confiscate and destroy all such inferior goods, "or

cause them to be amended."

This company limited the volume of business by forbidding any one

master to employ more than two apprentices at one time without express

permission; and, since all journeymen must first pass through the stage

of apprenticeship, this tended to keep up wages by limiting the labor

supply and to keep competition on a fair basis. The coat of arms of the

company represented a clock surmounted by a crown, the feet resting

upon the backs of four lions, all of gold, upon a black ground; on

either side were the figures of Father Time and of a king in royal

robes; and the motto beneath read: _Tempus Imperator Rerum_, or "Time,

the Emperor of Things." These matters sound rather quaint to us, but

perhaps the quaintest of them all is the idea of a monopoly concerning

itself so jealously with the quality of the product, and letting prices

and competition practically alone.

It was under such conditions that the English work was done and the

inventions made. Huyghens was, of course, not an Englishman; and Hooke

was rather an inventor and a scientist than a manufacturer. Both these

men themselves made clocks and watches, but they made them only as

instruments to assist them in their researches, or as working-models of

their design. It was often said of Hooke that he never cared to develop

an invention after he had proved that it would work. But once these

first inventions had been adopted, the real production of timepieces

was in the hands of the Clock-makers' Company, and the great names were

those of clock-makers.

These were the days when the leaders of the industry worked with their

own hands as well as with their heads. We may imagine the master seated

in the front room of his shop studying over a new model, or putting

together and decorating one already made; or, perhaps, making with his

own hands some of the most delicate parts. From the back rooms would

come the sound of tapping or filing as the journeymen and apprentices

were hard at work upon their various tasks. Meanwhile, perhaps some

apprentice, standing outside the door, would call out to passers-by and

urge them to step in and buy. This was a favorite form of advertising

in that time. For that matter, we still have our "barkers" and

"pullers-in" at Coney Island and elsewhere. Everything about the small

business was carried out under the personal direction of the master

and, where necessary, by his own hand. The phrase "clockmaker to the

King" meant something more when applied to such a man than merely that

royalty had purchased some product of his craft.

Such a one was Thomas Tompion, often called "the father of English

watchmaking." He was the leader of his craft in the time of Charles II

and he, more than anyone else, worked out the inventions of Hooke for

actual manufacture. He left his father's blacksmith shop to become a

clock-maker, from this he went on to the more delicate work of making

watches, and at last became a famous master of his guild. It may fairly

be said of him that he set the time for history in his day, for most

of the royalty and great men of Europe timed all their doings from

banquets to battles by Tompion watches.

Meanwhile, he, too, was making watchmaking history by his improvements.

Tompion made watches with hair-springs, balance-wheels and escapements

with various improvements. His design of the regulator is nearly that

in modern use. His cases, too, were as famous as the movements that

he made. The so-called "pendulum watches" were then much in fashion,

and Tompion met the demand by making a number of them. They did not,

of course, work with a pendulum; but one arm of the old foliot balance

could be seen through an opening in the case or dial, and looked like

a pendulum swinging to and fro. To read the advertisements of that

day one would think that all lost or stolen watches were of Tompion's

making, so often does his name appear in them.

Many legendary stories are told about Tompion's work. It has been set

down in cold print that Queen Mary gave one of his watches to Philip II

of Spain, and that he made watches for Queen Elizabeth. Unfortunately

for such stories, Tompion was not born until 1638, by which time both

Mary and Elizabeth had been dead for some years. But though the legends

themselves are untrue, yet they do shed some light upon their subject,

for such stories, true or false, are not told about unimportant men.

And it is true that Tompion grew so celebrated that at his death, in

1713, he was buried in Westminster Abbey, where only the great may have

resting-places.

Another famous watchmaker was George Graham, the inventor of the

mercury pendulum. He first was Tompion's journeyman, then his partner,

and at last became a well-known astronomer, having become interested

in astronomy through making astronomical clocks. But his great

contribution was the invention of the _dead-beat escapement_, which,

in one form or another, is in use in all the best clocks and watches

of the present time, and which has had more to do with making their

accuracy possible than has any other improvement since the discovery

of the isochronism of the pendulum and hair-springs. Graham, also, is

buried in Westminster Abbey; his body lies beside that of Tompion, his

teacher and friend.

Another famous figure was Daniel Quare, the first to devise the

mechanism for driving the two hands as we have it to-day. Quare was

a Quaker, and was no less prominent in the Society of Friends than in

his business. As a Quaker, he was opposed to taking an oath of any

kind, and was what we now call a "conscientious objector" to warfare.

Therefore, at the same time that he was being honored by royalty for

his work, he was being prosecuted and fined for his refusal to pay

taxes for the support of the army and of the Established Church. When

he was made clock-maker to King George I, means had to be devised for

excusing him from taking the oath of allegiance.

It was Quare who originated the practise of giving to each watch a

serial number, so that it could always be identified. This is, of

course, a common custom with us; we also number automobiles, and many

other manufactured articles of value, and Quare's device of numbering

watch-movements may very well have given the start to all this.

Still other famous watchmakers were Harrison and Arnold and Earnshaw,

who between them developed and perfected the marine chronometer

that we discussed in the last chapter; and Mudge, in whose hands

watch-movements really became modern in type. Men of this kind thought

first of producing reliable work which would give service; ornaments,

curiosities of workmanship, and even convenience, were secondary. Some

of these men were extremely independent; for example, Arnold, in his

early days and by way of establishing a reputation, made a repeating

watch less than a half-inch in diameter—so small that it was worn set

in a ring; but when King George III had bought the masterpiece, and the

Empress of Russia offered one thousand guineas (more than five thousand

dollars) for a duplicate, Arnold coolly excused himself on the plea

that he desired the specimen to remain unique.

Time passed; machinery began to be employed in manufacturing and

hand-work declined. The guild system in every line slowly changed into

our modern organized industry. This was only natural, for factories

were becoming larger, their output was increasing and the head of the

business was no longer likely to be himself a master workman. The

greater part of this change, of course, took place in the nineteenth

century, and was primarily owing to the increased use of machine-power

and improvement in transportation. But as regards watchmaking in

England, the substitution never became complete, for the bulldog

quality in the Englishman has always made him hold fast to his ideas.

Habits died hard, and the old methods were changed slowly and under

protest, even when these changes spelled progress.

At first, as we have seen, the watch was the work of one man and of his

assistants, and was almost entirely handmade. In those days, the trade

was supplied by a multitude of small independent manufacturers. To make

a single watch might take weeks or months; and every one must be

made separately and patiently, regardless of labor or expense. So long

as this method could hold its own, the English watchmakers led the

world; their watches were good, but they certainly were not cheap.

[Illustration: LATE—IN SPITE OF HIS TWO WATCHES

_The gallant of Colonial times often carried two watches, as was the

fashion, but often they were both unreliable._]

After a time, other countries began to use more modern methods, and

English watches could no longer stand competition in the world's

markets. However, the bulldog quality still held; English manufacturers

preferred to lose ground rather than change their methods. The

introduction of machinery and the employment of women operatives

were each bitterly opposed. Factory production was never adopted on

a large scale, nor was there much combination of small independent

manufacturers. Necessarily, these things did, at last, come to be done;

but half-heartedly, and without much success. At one time, for example,

there were some forty small factories making various parts which each

watch manufacturer assembled and adjusted for himself.

The Clock-makers' Company is still in existence; although now, of

course, it has developed into a society like the ordinary modern

association of manufacturers. Under pressure of change and competition,

English manufacturers were compelled unwillingly to change their system

of production, but the character of the watches they would not change.

The same country which had made so many of the mechanical inventions

finally settled down into satisfaction with its models at a time when

other nations were continuing to make improvements, as, for example,

when they clung to the fusee after watchmakers abroad had found a

better substitute.

The English watch has remained heavy, substantial, and reliable; it is

an excellent mechanism produced regardless of expense. Such a watch

cannot be made cheaply, least of all by British methods. There has been

something obstinate in the maker's attitude; if the law of supply and

demand called for something different, so much the worse for the law.

The English have been slow to see the possibilities in the cheap watch.

They have not realized that a watch need not be expensive in order to

keep good time. They _started_ to put the watch into universal use, but

left to other nations the completion of the process.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

_What Happened in France and Switzerland_

Across the English Channel lives a race of a very different character.

The French are people of highly adaptable minds; often they see

possibilities in the inventions of other nations which those other

nations have failed themselves to see. The automobile was first made in

the United States, but the French soon developed it into something that

was better than our early clumsy cars, and we were years in overtaking

them. The Wright Brothers first learned the secret of aerial flight,

and then Wilbur Wright sailed for France, where the people went wild

with enthusiasm over the idea of flying; it was in France that aviation

really became what it is to-day.

The French have always been fine mechanics and finished workmen.

It was to be expected that they would do something artistic and

interesting with the manufacture of timepieces. They could not make a

better watch than the British were turning out toward the end of the

eighteenth century. Nobody could—but they could make it more beautiful.

In Shakespeare's time and afterward, while watches were still more

valuable as works of art than they could be as timepieces, the richest

work of this nature was done in France. There watches were made in

the form of mandolins and other musical instruments, in the form of

flowers, in the form of jeweled butterflies, and in wonderful cases,

painted and enameled and engraved. In the J. Pierpont Morgan collection

in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, there is a watch which, in

1800, on the fete-day after the battle of Marengo, Napoleon Bonaparte

gave to Murat, who was his brother-in-law and one of his generals. On

the back cover of this watch appears a miniature portrait of Napoleon

himself. And since he himself was the author of the gift, one may

assume that it represented the Great Emperor's own conception of

himself.

The wrist-watch, to-day a military necessity, was at first a French

idea. It is interesting to learn that the merchants and makers of

this kind of work were in their own time called neither watchmakers

nor horologists, but toymen. There again is shown the old idea about

watches; they were not timepieces but toys.

Later on, toward the end of the period of invention, when first, the

clock, and soon afterward, the watch, had become fairly accurate

timekeepers, the French makers again took the lead in the same way;

once more they beautified what they could not practically improve.

The French clocks of the period of Louis XIV and his successors are

celebrated for their design. One might easily suppose, from an

examination of the great modern collections of rare and precious

watches in our museums that the French had been the leading watchmakers

of the world, for the specimens there found being selected chiefly

for beauty or value from the collector's point of view, are oftener

of French than of any other make. Yet it must not be supposed that

the French made no inventions. The credit for some of the important

improvements is disputed between the English, French and Swiss, and

it is not always easy to decide which nation has the better claim.

Furthermore, certain of the French watchmakers came from Switzerland

while at various times, some of those in France moved to England,

especially during the reign of Terror. The distinctions are somewhat

confused and we can only speak in a general way.

However, while the watchmaking industry was developing in France, it

gave forth a seed which took root in new soil. In the hill country of

eastern France, in the town of Autun, there lived a watchmaker named

Charles Cusin. One day, in 1574, for reasons that we do not know, he

moved a few miles eastward across the border into Switzerland and

there settled in the beautiful lake city of Geneva. He probably had

no thought that this personal act of a private citizen would have an

effect upon history, but an industry employing thousands of people and

making millions of dollars worth of goods can be traced back to the

time when he crossed the border.

Remember that this was back in the days of Shakespeare and Queen

Elizabeth, while watches were still esteemed jewels and ornaments

for the wealthy, and when the improvements which later made them

practically useful had not yet been invented. The business side of

watchmaking was thus growing up at the same time with the inventive

and scientific; it was preparing itself for the day when the mechanism

should be perfected, and the only remaining task would be to popularize

its perfection.

Charles Cusin liked Switzerland and thirteen years later he became

a citizen. In the course of time, he was active in founding a

watchmaker's guild in Geneva and from that period Geneva watches

have been famous. This does not mean that Switzerland had contained

no watchmakers before Cusin's appearance, but we are considering the

beginnings of a great industry and not mere instances of isolated

workmen. The man from Autun seems to have been one of those energetic

leaders who see possibilities and know how to organize. It is largely

through such men that the world progresses.

You will remember that in an early chapter we touched upon the way in

which men first began to exchange the results of their work in order

that each man might devote most of his time to the special task for

which he was best fitted, such as hunting, or the making of weapons.

Through this exchange, _everyone_ was enabled to live better than

_anyone_ could have lived by himself. But if it were true that people

doing _different_ things could help each other, it also became true,

after a while, that people doing the _same_ thing could help each

other and could help the general public, by learning to co-operate.

They could exchange ideas, improve their work, and bring about better

conditions. This was one of the effects of the guilds—they changed

crafts into industries.

The guild with which Charles Cusin now had to do—some say he was

its sole founder—was a very dignified and important board of

master-workmen. It was founded about fifty years earlier than was the

Worshipful Clock-makers' Company in England, and its members were

no ordinary workmen. Switzerland was, and still is, a thoroughly

independent little country and a man skilful enough to make a whole

watch with his own hands was apt to be a man who realized his own worth.

The members of this guild were decidedly particular about their dignity

and their meetings were serious occasions, as may be seen from Article

I of their regulations which read: "Whenever the master workmen shall

meet in a body to discuss subjects pertaining to their guild, they

shall, before proceeding to such discussion, offer prayer to God

beseeching Him that all that they say and do may rebound to His glory

and may further the interests of these people."

As a matter of fact this dignity was based upon a correct conception

that has been somewhat overlooked in the present busy age. The man

who has to do either with the manufacture or sale of timepieces does

well to take his position seriously since he is a most important link

in our entire civilization. Such a man may well reflect upon the fact

that without the timepieces which he produces or sells, the world would

drop into hopeless confusion, for human society is able to run smoothly

and efficiently only when it is correctly timed. Workmen and dealers

engaged in such a vital industry have a great responsibility to their

fellow-men.

It is probable that members of this guild who met from time to time in

the Swiss city by the lake shores, under the shadows of the snow-topped

Alps, realized something of this responsibility. Their timepieces were

not yet as accurate as are ours of to-day, and the world was not yet

so busy that its affairs required the closest adjustment, but they at

least were trying earnestly to keep the human cogs running smoothly

by turning out watches as nearly perfect as their skill and knowledge

would permit.

This may be seen again in Article V of their regulations; "The

functions of the jurors are to enforce the laws of the guild and to

provide that there be no infringement of the same. To this end,

they shall be required to visit each journeyman at least four times

during the year, having power to seize all articles which do not

conform to the specifications now in force, to report all delinquents

to the worthy governing board, and to punish the offenders in

accordance with the gravity of their fault."

[Illustration:

Limoges Enamel English Repeater

Watch about 1650

English 1610-25

Silver

Skull Watch, French.

Intended to remind the

wearer that each second

brought death nearer

Gold Enamel French Watch

Watch—French intended for the

head of a cane,

1645-70

Agate Case

French

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY WATCHES

_Grew more elaborate and ornamental, but scarcely more useful._

_In the collections of the Metropolitan Museum._]

It is quite clear that Geneva was out for quality in watches, and,

indeed the name of the Swiss city has always been associated with

quality. Nevertheless, they were no angels—those old Swiss craftsmen;

they were in fact quite preponderatingly human. Thus it was not long

before they began to make a tight little monopoly of their business.

They restricted the number of workmen who might be admitted to the

guild, and they secured special ordinances by means of which all other

watchmakers were forbidden to establish themselves within a certain

distance of the city. In other words, they did not purpose allowing the

new and promising industry to grow beyond their control.

There were, however, other independent people in those days who hadn't

the slightest intention of being bound by such restrictions. Here and

there, a watchmaker left Geneva to carry on his work in some foreign

city, as, for example, in Besancon, France. Thus began a competition

which grew and spread as time went on.

This competition developed some interesting features. For example, the

guild in Geneva obtained the passage of laws forbidding anyone from

bringing into the city, in a finished state, a watch constructed within

a certain distance. "Schemes" for watches and certain parts might be

made at will, but only members of the citizen guild were permitted to

complete these schemes.

Such restrictions naturally did not tend toward low-priced watches;

but all watches in those days were necessarily high-priced, and a man

wealthy enough to afford one was apt to seek the best that could be

bought. Geneva's strictness gave it so great a reputation that during

the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries foreign watchmakers flocked

to the Swiss city very much as art students later journeyed to Paris,

and it became the acknowledged center of the European industry. As time

went on the demand for time-pieces became more widespread and many

Genevans moved to other cities where they became dealers in Geneva

watches. It is said that, in 1725, the city of Constantinople contained

as many as eighty-eight mercantile agents who had become established in

this way.

One hundred years after the founding of the guild, Geneva was producing

five thousand watches a year, having one hundred masters of the guild

and three hundred journeymen. Now five thousand watches is no small

output when it is considered that each one must be constructed entirely

by hand and occupied a matter of weeks in the making; yet, by 1799, the

city contained nearly six thousand watchmakers and jewelers and was

producing fifty thousand timepieces a year.

Not many miles to the northward from Geneva is another mountain

city—that of Neuchatel. Neuchatel also contained an enterprising and

skilful population, for the Swiss people seem to have been naturally

ingenious and skilful in the use of tools. Doubtless the mountainous

character of the country has had something to do with this fact;

farming and fruit-raising are slow, hard work in their rocky soil and

severe climate and the making of bulky articles is not desirable where

transportation must be had over mountain trails.

The Swiss with their clever fingers had long been famous for their

wood-carving; now, when they had a chance at an industry which called

for delicate and skilful hand-work and which produced goods of small

size and high value, it exactly suited them.

Geneva "saw it first," but kept it so closely to herself that it was

several generations later before watches were known in the Neuchatel

district not far away, yet, this district is another great center of

the industry.

It is said that in 1680, more than one hundred years after Charles

Cusin moved to Geneva, a horse-dealer from the little town of La Sagne,

came home from his travels and brought with him an English watch. Great

was the wonder that it excited among the simple people of his native

place. They passed from hand to hand the little ticking mechanism

which had the strange power to tell time, and then one day the ticking

ceased, which perhaps is not surprising, in view of the freedom with

which the watch had been handled.

The horse-dealer knew nothing of the mechanism but was very anxious to

have the works set right. It chanced that there was a young locksmith

in La Sagne, a lad of only fifteen, named Daniel Jean Richard, who was

so skilful and ingenious that he had already made repairs in the tower

clock of the village. "Show the watch to Daniel Jean Richard" said

everybody.

The delighted lad began to take the delicate mechanism apart, studying

carefully each wheel and spring and lever until he felt that he

understood exactly how it should work. Then, when he had succeeded in

reassembling the parts and in making the watch tick bravely once more,

he was seized with a great ambition to build another one all by himself.

After many experiments with his crude locksmith tools, he did produce

a watch which would run and which would tell time after a fashion—the

first watch ever made in the Neuchatel district—but it did not satisfy

his artist's soul and he realized that he must have better tools.

Somebody told him that there was in Geneva a machine for cutting

wheels, and he set out to see it for himself, only to come back sadly

disappointed. Wherever he asked to see the machine, the canny Geneva

craftsmen shook their heads. This eager lad from another town had far

too intelligent a face to be allowed to learn the precious secrets. The

most that they would do was to let him have a few of the wheels made by

the machine.

Then he began to work out for himself a machine to cut the wheels,

and at last succeeded in the task, so that before long he was well

on the way to becoming a watch manufacturer. Richard, however, was

generous with his ideas; he instructed a number of the young men of his

district, so that watchmaking soon began to flourish in his town and in

those about it.

We have now seen how the watchmaking industry became established in

two great centers—in Geneva, where the highest quality was maintained,

but under the rule of the guild, which did not encourage quantity of

output, and in the Neuchatel region where no guild system existed. In

the course of time this latter region overtook and passed in quantity

of output that of Geneva. By 1818, the Neuchatel district of the Jura

was turning out watches at the rate of 130,000 a year.

The solid old Geneva watchmakers criticized their rivals as being less

exacting in quality and less careful as to the standard of gold used

in their cases, but the Neuchatel people had no difficulty in finding

customers; we read that one hundred and forty of their merchants went

twice a year to the Leipsig fair, where they sometimes sold watches to

the value of four million francs ($800,000) in a year.

The two principal centers of Swiss watchmaking have been mentioned

although, of course, watches were made in other districts as well. It

is easy to see that many generations ago it had already become a very

large industry, and so we need not be surprised to learn that even

to-day the tiny inland country produces a larger annual export value of

watches than even our vast United States. Watchmaking has been so large

a source of wealth that the Swiss government has aided it in every

way, including the establishment of schools and courses for training

skilled workmen. More than sixty thousand Swiss people are directly

employed in the Swiss watch industry and over three hundred thousand,

or one-twelfth of the entire population, are indirectly connected with

it. The Swiss have also made many inventions and improvements so that

they have had much to do with the development of the watch itself as

well as with the industry.

As we have already seen, it was a Swiss who invented the fusee, another

who introduced the use of jewels for reducing friction and the stemwind

is also of Swiss origin. It was the Swiss, too, who, early in the

nineteenth century, did away with the solid upper plate which covered

the works and used, instead, a system of bridges. The bridge form of

movement allows each part to be repaired or adjusted separately and

to-day it is to be found in all watches of the higher grades.

The Swiss invention of the fusee, described in Chapter VIII, played an

important part for several hundred years, but at last it was replaced

by something simpler and still more effective. Made to equalize the

difference in the pressure exerted by a stiff mainspring when first

wound up and when partly run down, it worked beautifully but was rather

clumsy; and it required comparatively heavier parts which naturally

necessitated the use of greater power. Thus friction and, consequently,

wear were increased. But the Swiss by making watch-parts that were very

light but yet strong, and by reducing friction principally through the

introduction of jewels into the mechanism, succeeded at last in getting

a movement that could be run with very little power. So they now could

use a weak and slender mainspring, made so long that only its middle

part ever was wound and unwound, and thus the pressure remained equal,

and the use of the fusee was no longer necessary. This principle,

called the "going barrel" construction, reduced friction, and made

the thin modern watch a possibility. The American makers, as we shall

presently see, adopted the "going barrel" construction practically from

the first. They had no traditional prejudices, and they knew a good

mechanical idea when they saw it.

But the British would have none of it. Their national bulldog quality

set its teeth on the old idea that had given them their heavy,

substantial, accurate watches, and hung on grimly. The Swiss watches

might be lighter and more graceful but they questioned their lasting

qualities. The Swiss could make watches more beautifully, but the

English were suspicious of cheapness and declined to adopt the new

development.

Thus the English, who up to about 1840, had led the world in the

manufacture and sale of watches, began to fall behind. The American

watch industry was then in its infancy, and the French industry had

never been of any great size. The Swiss gradually drew ahead until

they practically gained control of the world's market for watches.

Switzerland became known as the place from which watches came, and,

very much as "Havana" stands for a fine cigar, so a fine watch was apt

to be called a "Geneva."

[Illustration: THE SWISS "MANUFACTURER" AND A CRAFTSMAN

_In former days, Swiss workmen made some particular watch part in

their own homes, while so-called "manufacturers" bought the parts and

"assembled" the watches._]

This, then, was the situation at about the middle of the nineteenth

century when watchmaking in America was beginning to grow into a large

industry. The French had always made good watches and very beautiful

and elaborate ones too, but they never made very many. The English

were falling behind so far that it was said, in 1870, that half the

watchmakers' tools in England were in pawn. The Swiss were in control

of the business, making both the best and the worst watches in the

world and by far the greatest number. Everywhere a good watch was still

too costly to be owned by anyone of moderate means, while cheap watches

were little more than toys which could not be depended upon either to

wear well or to keep good time.

In spite of all developments, therefore, there still remained the need

both for a high-grade watch at a reasonable price and for a cheap watch

that would be accurate under rough usage. These things were genuinely

necessary, for the world was growing steadily away from the theory

of special privilege, and the requirements of the average man were

becoming more insistent.

From those early days, when the astrologers in Mesopotamia had kept

their knowledge a secret for themselves, down through more than forty

centuries, only a few had possessed the means of accurately telling

time; but now had come the railroad, the telegraph, the modern factory,

the newspaper and many other developments which speeded up the

movements of humanity in the rush and whirl of modern life until it had

become absolutely necessary that the means of measuring and performing

those movements in an economical manner should be within the reach of

every man.

It remains to be shown how American watchmaking discovered this need

and organized to meet it; how it found and filled the gap that had been

left in foreign watchmaking, between high-priced watches that were

good, and low-priced watches that were not good; how it developed a

cheaper good watch and a better low-priced one than the world had so

far known; and how, in so doing, the American industry has grown within

the memory of living men to such an extent as to take second place,

and, in many respects, first place in watchmaking throughout the world.

CHAPTER TWELVE

_How An American Industry Came On Horseback_

At last the clock industry came to America, and it came on horseback.

If you had been upon a dusty country road in Connecticut about the year

1800, you might have seen a plainly dressed young man come riding along

with a clock strapped to each side of his saddle and a third fastened

crosswise behind him.

"Hello, Eli Terry!" you might have heard some farmer sing out, as the

rider drew near.

"Hello, Silas," the other would call back; "don't you think it's about

time you bought a clock?"

"Can't afford it, Eli; it takes me a long time to make forty dollars

raising wheat."

"Yes; but you can't afford to be without one, Silas." And, dismounting,

he would unstrap one of the clocks and bring it up to the stone wall.

Then would follow the period of bargaining, so dear to the shrewd,

hard-headed sons of Connecticut. Perhaps when young Terry climbed back

into the saddle and said "Gid-dap," one of his clocks would stay behind

with the farmer. Like most successful salesmen, Terry was a close

observer of human nature; he knew that habits once formed are hard

to break. He discovered early that if a prospective customer could be

made to depend upon a clock for telling time, the clock would soon sell

itself. One day, during a rain-storm, he sought refuge in a farmer's

home. He brought in with him one of his clocks and placed it on the

mantel over the fireplace, explaining that he would like to leave it

there, where it would not get wet, while he continued on his journey.

"I'll be back for it in a few days," he said, as he waved good-by.

When Terry returned, some days later, the farmer realized that the

clock, which he had first regarded as an extravagance had somehow

become a necessity, and, with no urging on Terry's part, the sale was

quickly completed.

Some of the original clocks are still running in the very farmhouses

where Eli Terry succeeded in selling them, and where they have ticked

off the minutes of American history since the days of Adams and

Jefferson. They were truly remarkable clocks, in spite of the fact

that their works were cut out of hard wood with country tools, and put

together by a carpenter.

The first American clocks were made of wood, and most of the early

clockmakers were at first carpenters. We have seen clockmakers

developing from priests and astronomers and blacksmiths and locksmiths

and jewelers; but here is a new gateway to the trade. This came about

naturally enough in a country where the cheapest and most plentiful

material was wood, and where the carpenter and joiner was accustomed to

constructing every possible thing of it. Eli Terry of Connecticut was

one of the best known of these early New England craftsmen. He was born

in East Windsor, just a few years before the Revolution. By the time

that he was twenty, he had made a few clocks, cutting the wheels out of

hard wood with saw and file, and making wooden hands, dials, and cases.

Then he moved to Plymouth, not far from Waterbury, and set up a small

shop where he employed several workmen. They would make a dozen or two

at a time, entirely by hand. Then Terry would take these out and sell

them, sometimes as far as the "new country" across the New York state

line.

It took a long time to make a clock in this way, even for fingers that

were as clever as Terry's, and it is no wonder that he was compelled to

charge from twenty to forty dollars apiece, a sum, which, by-the-way,

would be equal to at least four times as much to-day according to

the difference in the purchasing power of money. We must remember,

too, that a family then bought its clock as it bought a wagon or a

spinning-wheel, almost as a man buys his house to-day. Certainly it

was a far more important transaction relatively than the purchase of a

motor-car.

Probably, if one could have overheard some of these roadside

clock-sales it would have been noted that the bargaining was not all

upon one side, for there was not a great deal of money in circulation,

and people were very apt to "swap." Likely as not, Terry would have to

take his payment in lumber, in clothing, or in some other commodity

and these, in turn, he would dispose of when an opportunity presented

itself. This was more or less the type of the old horseback Yankee

trader of the days when men still remembered the Revolutionary War.

These were the days when a man who produced some one thing might be

forced, in order to realize on its value, to trade it for almost

anything else.

When we think of the early American timepiece, we generally picture to

ourselves the so-called "Grandfather's Clock," the kind with the tall

case which Longfellow wrote about as standing on a turning in the stair

and ticking away: "Forever!" "Never!" "Never!" "Forever!" as it marked

the passage of the years. But Eli Terry, the first of all American

clock-makers, could not well carry such a big contrivance with him

on his horseback trips; therefore, while he made the works for these

clocks, he left it for other people to construct the cases; the clocks

which he sold complete were those which could stand upon a shelf or

hang upon the wall.

After a time, his orders increased to a point where he felt justified

in moving into an old water-power mill and rigging machinery to do

some parts of the work. Thus we find machinery used in American

clock-making almost from the beginning of the industry. Terry thus

was a real manufacturer; he had grasped the importance of machine

production in contrast to hand-craftsmanship.

The move paid; it cut the cost of making nearly in half and greatly

increased the output. He now could afford to sell his clocks more

cheaply, and the business grew at once. After a while he began to make

clocks in lots of one or two hundred and then, indeed, his neighbors

shook their heads gravely.

"You are losing your mind, Eli," they told him, in solemn warning. "The

first thing you know, the country will be so full of clocks that there

will be no market for them. You are getting reckless and ruining your

business."

But Eli Terry followed his own judgment instead of that of the

croakers; before he died he was making ten or twelve thousand clocks in

a year and was selling them too. They brought him a fortune.

Thus was the industry of making timepieces born in America. It began

in New England, which is still the chief center of manufacture, and it

began with clocks, not watches, for the simple reason that in those

days, a watch was a luxury whereas a clock was a necessity. Like the

watch industry in Switzerland, American clock-making was an active

business from the start, and, as we have seen, the man with whom it

started was a typically Yankee combination of ingenious mind, skilful

fingers, and a knack for business.

Of course, the conditions of life in America at that time had a great

deal to do with methods used in building up the industry. Instead of

a civilization centuries old that had wealth, rank, royalty, and a

complete organization of all methods of living, here was a new country

learning to do things in its own way.

It is hard for us to imagine the conditions which prevailed when our

whole population was a mere fringe of scattered settlements along the

Atlantic seaboard; when people made long trips on horseback or by

stage-coach and men wore powdered wigs and knickerbockers; when New

York was a small town on the lower end of Manhattan Island, and Chicago

had not even been dreamed of. Still, it was necessary to tell time, and

our thrifty ancestors needs must watch the minutes in order to save

them as thriftily as they saved everything else. Not one person out

of hundreds, in a country where a living must be wrung from the soil

by means of hard work, could afford to own anything so expensive as a

watch, but every one felt it necessary to have a clock, if possible,

and it became one of the greatest treasures of the home.

[Illustration: THE FIRST YANKEE CLOCK MAKER

_Eli Terry, America's first clock manufacturer, peddled his wares among

the shrewd, hard-headed sons of Connecticut._]

This, then, was the market in which Terry and those who followed him

had to sell. It was a market that could not afford to pay for ornament

but desired practical service at low cost. What was needed,

therefore, was a clock that would keep time and cost not a cent more

than was absolutely necessary. The American industry was forced to

start upon a basis entirely different from that of Europe.

As Eli Terry's business grew, he needed assistance, and he secured the

help of a young mechanic named Seth Thomas from West Haven, and the two

worked together for some time.

The name of Seth Thomas has appeared upon so many clock-dials that it

is perhaps the best known name in all American clock-making. He was a

good mechanic, and a good business man, and he had ideas of his own

about increasing trade. In the course of time, about the year 1800,

he and a man named Silas Hoadley bought the original Terry factory

in the old mill, and set up business for themselves. Terry, however,

established himself elsewhere and continued to manufacture clocks.

Thus the industry was growing; there were now two factories instead

of one. Seth Thomas prospered by adopting each popular fashion or

improvement in clocks as it came along and applying it upon as large

a scale and as honestly and well as could be done. He built up such a

reputation that even to-day, while the name of Seth Thomas on a clock

face does not suggest any particular form or style of clock, it is

associated with good time keeping and honest workmanship.

The third of the famous old New England clock-makers was Chauncey

Jerome. He was a man younger than Terry and Thomas by nearly a

generation. Like both of his predecessors he was brought up to the

carpenter's trade, and like both of them he was a born New England

trader. But of the three, Jerome was perhaps most the inventor and

least the man of business. As a boy, he worked for Seth Thomas when

Thomas was still building barns and houses. He worked for Eli Terry in

the old shop at Plymouth. Then, after a period of soldiering in the

War of 1812, he went back to clock-making, sometimes manufacturing by

himself and sometimes associated with one or the other of the two older

men, or in other firms and enterprises too numerous to follow. Always

he seems to have been somewhat of a rolling stone, although in his time

he gathered as much moss as the best of them: always he was inclined to

experiment with new ideas.

Jerome's carpentering skill caused him to be first interested in

the making of cases, and most of the familiar forms of old American

clocks—the square clock with pillars at the corners and a scroll top,

the clock with a mirror underneath the dial and the like, were designed

by Terry and Jerome between them. Later on, when the establishment of

brass foundries in Waterbury and Bristol had enabled American makers

to construct their work of brass instead of wood, Jerome worked out a

design for a brass one-day timepiece in a wooden case, small enough

for easy transportation, and cheaper than any clock ever made up to

that time. Its price at first, near the place of manufacture, was only

five or six dollars, but afterwards this was reduced.

This low-priced clock was as remarkable in its way as was the dollar

watch, which it foreshadowed. And like the watch, it would not have

been possible except through machine work and quantity production.

It was a success at once and Jerome's business rapidly increased. In

1840, he was established in Bristol, turning out the new clocks by the

thousand, and rapidly making a fortune. A year or two later, he decided

to send a consignment of them to England.

Again, people shook their heads and prophesied failure. "You're losing

your mind, Chauncey," they told him as they had told Eli Terry before

him.

The older wooden movements could not, of course, endure a sea voyage

without swelling and becoming useless. A brass movement could, of

course, be sent anywhere, and some of the more expensive ones had been

shipped to all parts of the country, yet it seemed absurd enough to

send American clocks to England where labor was so cheap—to England,

which was then the chief clockmaker of the world. Nevertheless, Jerome

persevered, and his son sailed for London with a cargo of the cheap

clocks. At first, the English trade would have none of them. No clock

so cheap could possibly be good, they said, and Connecticut was the

home of "the wooden nutmegs." It was only after great difficulty that

they were introduced. Young Jerome got rid of the first few by leaving

them about in retail stores, asking no payment for them until sold.

The enterprise was saved by an event which was a joke in itself. The

English revenue law at that time permitted the owner of imported goods

to fix their taxable value. But the government could take any such

property upon payment of a sum ten per cent greater than the owner's

valuation. Jerome's clocks were valued at their wholesale price, and

were presently seized by the customs officials on the ground that this

valuation was fraudulently low.

The elder Jerome chuckled upon learning of this. He was well satisfied

to have closed out his first cargo at ten per cent profit, and at once

sent over another shipment which was taken over by the customs as

promptly as the first. But by the time the third consignment arrived,

enough of the clocks had been sold to establish a demand for them among

the retailers, and the officials finally conceded that the low price

might be a reasonable one after all.

Jerome was not at the height of his prosperity. He had the largest and

probably the most profitable clock business in the country; and, in

the few years following, his product was exported to all parts of the

world. Then the Bristol factory burned down and he moved to New Haven,

where the Jerome Manufacturing Company enjoyed a brief period of great

success. The business was constantly extended, and the wholesale price

of the cheap brass clocks was brought as low as seventy-five cents.

This figure seems almost impossibly low for the time, but the authority

for it is Jerome's own autobiography.

A few years before the Civil War, the Jerome Company failed and,

curiously enough, this failure came about through its connection

with that usually successful man, P. T. Barnum, the famous showman.

The story is too much complicated to be given here in detail, but it

seems that Barnum had become heavily interested in a smaller clock

company, which was merged with the Jerome concern. The overvaluation

of its stock, combined with mismanagement and speculation among the

officials of the Jerome Company, served to drive the whole business

into bankruptcy. Barnum lost heavily, and it took him years to clear

up his obligations. Jerome never did recover from it; after some years

of failing power in the employ of other manufacturers, he died in

comparative poverty.

His long and eventful life spans the whole growth of the American clock

business from the days of Eli Terry and his handsawed wooden movements

down to the maturity of the modern business supplying, by factory

methods and the use of specialized machinery, millions of clocks to

all parts of the world. He had made clocks all over Connecticut, in

Plymouth, Farmington, Bristol, New Haven and Waterbury, as well as

in Massachusetts and, for a time, in South Carolina and Virginia. He

had worked with his hands for Terry and Seth Thomas at the old wooden

wheels and veneered cases, which were peddled about the country and

sold for thirty or forty dollars each to be the treasured timekeepers

of many households. And he had headed a modern factory, turning out

dollar clocks by the tens of thousands.

It is said that a child in the first few years of its life lives

briefly through the whole evolution of civilized mankind. That "infant

industry," American clock-making, likewise, in the short space of

fifty years passed through most of the steps of the whole growth of

time-recording between the Middle Ages and our own era. This country

stands now among the leading clock-making nations of the world; its

product is famous in every land and a timepiece from Waterbury or New

Haven may mark the minutes in the town from which Gerbert was banished

for sorcery because he made a time-machine, or in that land between the

rivers where the Babylonians first looked out upon the stars.

Most of the American clocks are still made in Connecticut; in fact,

more than eighty per cent of the whole world's supply (excluding the

German) comes from the Naugatuck Valley. The New Haven Clock Company,

which is the successor of the Jerome Company, is to-day one of the

largest. As far back as 1860, it was producing some two hundred

thousand clocks a year. The Seth Thomas Company and others of the

historic concerns are still at work in various portions of the state.

And the Benedict & Burnham Company, with which, at one time, Chauncey

Jerome was associated, became the Waterbury Clock Company, now regarded

as the largest clock producer, and of which we shall hear more later on.

The key-note of the whole development was that new principle which

American invention, prompted and stimulated by the pressing necessities

of a new nation, brought into the business of time-recording—the

principle of marvelously cheapening production-costs without loss of

efficiency, through the systematic employment of machinery on a large

scale.

As long as the inventive brains and the technical knowledge of the

old-time craftsman found expression only through his own fingers, the

results would be limited to his individual production, and the costs

would be proportionately high. When, however, the master mind was able

to operate through rows of machines, each under the supervision of

a mechanic trained to its particular function, his inventive genius

was provided with ten thousand hands and a hundred thousand fingers.

Furthermore, the production gained in quality as well as in quantity,

because of specialization, all the time its costs were in process of

reduction. This, perhaps, has been America's chief contribution, not

only to the making of timepieces, but, also to the world's industry in

general.

[Illustration: English Clock about 1700—Floral Marquetry in Walnut

Ground

American Clock Black Walnut on Pine Eighteenth Century

"GRANDFATHER'S CLOCKS"

_These huge but beautiful clocks represent the most reliable form

of timepiece known to the people of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth

Centuries. In the Metropolitan Museum._]

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

_America Learns to Make Watches_

While Eli Terry was sawing wood for his curious clocks back in the

early days of the nineteenth century, Luther Goddard, America's

first watch-manufacturer, was preaching the Gospel to the town and

country-folk in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Between sermons he

repaired watches.

Although we can find no record of such a meeting, it is easy to imagine

that while plodding along some dusty country road Preacher Goddard met

Terry jogging along with his cumbersome wooden clocks hanging from his

saddle. The thought may have come to the minister-mechanic that it

would be much easier to peddle watches than clocks.

Whatever may have been the prompting, we find, as a matter of record,

that, in the year 1809, while Terry was making and peddling his

clocks, Luther Goddard set up a small watch-making shop in Shrewsbury,

Massachusetts, the place of his birth. He employed watch-makers who had

learned their trade in England. At that time, there was a law in force

which prohibited the importation of foreign-made watches into America

and this gave Goddard his chance. But in 1815, when the law was

repealed and the American market was quickly flooded with cheaper, if

not better watches from abroad, he was forced to retire from the field.

During those few years he had produced about five hundred watches.

Discouraged by his venture into worldly affairs, he turned again to

his former occupation of preacher and evangelist, and consoled himself

with the remark that he "had here a profession high above his secular

vocation." In those days, protection and free trade had not yet become

the rival rallying cries of two great political parties; otherwise we

might have found this early manufacturer entering politics instead of

the pulpit. While he is credited with manufacturing the first American

watches, however, it is doubtful whether he and his workmen really did

more than to assemble imported parts.

More than twenty years now passed before another effort was made

to produce watches in America—this time by two brothers—Henry and

James F. Pitkin of Hartford, Connecticut. In 1838, they brought out

a watch, most of the parts of which were made by machinery, but it

proved more or less a failure. After a brief struggle, they gave up in

discouragement. Henry Pitkin died in 1845, and his brother, a few years

later.

While the Pitkin Brothers were struggling with their problem in

Hartford, Jacob D. Custer of Norristown, Pennsylvania, was engaged in

a similar task. He succeeded in making a few watches between 1840 and

1845, thus gaining his niche in history as the third American watch

manufacturer.

But all of these were merely forerunners, for now there stepped upon

the stage a young man whose ability and perseverance were destined

to launch American watch-making fairly upon its way. This young man

was born in Hingham, Massachusetts, in 1813, and his name was Edward

Howard; it was born in him to be an inventive and ingenious craftsman

and to feel toward the mechanism of time-keeping the devotion of an

artist to his art. At the age of sixteen, he was apprenticed to Aaron

Willard, Jr., of Roxbury, one of the cleverest clock-makers of his time.

Young Howard took to clock-making as naturally as a Gloucester man

takes to the sea. Some of the clocks he then made are still ticking as

vigorously as ever. Having presently learned all he cared to know about

clock-making, he cast about for other fields of action. His bent, as

he himself said, "was all for the finer and more delicate mechanism,"

and it was natural that these qualities of the watch should absorb his

interest. It was equally natural, since he was an American clock-maker

at a time when that trade was being revolutionized by machine-work,

that he should dream of applying such methods to the watch.

"One difficulty I found," he is quoted as saying, "was that

watch-making did not exist in the United States as an industry. There

were watchmakers, so-called, at that time, and there are great numbers

of the same kind now, but they never made a watch; their business

being only to clean and repair. I knew from experience that there was

no proper system employed in making watches. The work was all done

by hand. Now, hand-work is superior in many of the arts because it

allows variation according to the individuality of the worker. But

in the exquisitely fine wheels and screws and pinions that make up

the parts of a watch, the less variation the better. Some of these

parts are so fine as to be almost invisible to the naked eye. A

variation of one five-thousandths of an inch would throw the watch out

altogether, or make it useless as a timepiece. As I say, all of these

minute parts were laboriously cut and filed out by hand, so it will

readily be understood that in watches purporting to be of the same

size and of the same makers, there are no two alike, and there was no

interchangeability of parts. Consequently it was 'cut and try'. A great

deal of time was wasted and many imperfections resulted."

Howard's ambition lay in the production of a perfect watch for its

own sake; and he wanted to make it by machinery, believing that, in

that way, it could be made most perfectly. Other people had thought

of the same thing. Pitkin had attempted it, and there had been some

experiments of like nature in Switzerland. But the man who loves his

work as Howard did will succeed in anything short of the impossible,

because neither time nor labor, neither failure nor discouragement,

matter at all to him as against the hope of making his dream come true.

As Howard was emerging into young manhood, the great period of

American invention was rapidly developing. Morse was struggling with

the electric telegraph which he invented and perfected in 1835, and

Goodyear was busy with machinery and processes for enabling rubber

to be used commercially, thus laying the foundation for one of the

greatest American industries of to-day. Ingenuity was in the air and

invention was conquering realms that had been believed beyond reach.

When people told Howard that it was absurd to think of improving upon

the manual skill of centuries, he answered that he expected to make his

machinery by hand. And when they said that a machine for watch-making

would be more wonderful than the watch itself, he only laughed and

agreed that this might be so.

To-day, we are familiar with such phrases as "standardized parts" and

"quantity production," which explain to us how it is possible for

a single factory to produce millions of watches in a year, or for

another kind of plant to turn out half a million automobiles in a like

period. The way in which "quantity production" came about is curiously

interesting. Watch-making received one of its greatest impulses from a

famous American inventor who probably would have been amazed had anyone

told him that his idea upon quite another subject would some day help

to put watches into millions of pockets.

There is no particular connection between a cotton-gin and the

"quantity production" of watches, but it is interesting to know that

the same ingenious brain which designed the one also unconsciously

suggested the other. Late in the eighteenth century, Eli Whitney gained

lasting fame as the inventor of a machine which would automatically

separate the seeds from the fiber of crude cotton—a machine which

revolutionized the cotton industry of the south.

In 1798, Whitney secured a contract to manufacture rifles for the

government. He decided that they could be made much more rapidly and

cheaply if he could find some way to produce all the separate parts in

large quantities by machinery, and then merely assemble the various

parts into the completed weapon. The inventive mind which was capable

of devising the cotton-gin found this new problem to be comparatively

simple, and it was not long before Whitney was making thousands of

rifles from machine-made "standardized parts," where only one could be

made before. Half a century later his machinery was still turning out

rifles parts in the great arsenal at Springfield, Massachusetts, and

it was not until this period that it exerted a distinct influence upon

watch-making.

While Howard in Roxbury was dreaming of producing watches by machinery,

another young man—Aaron L. Dennison, of Boston—was also obsessed with

the same dream and grappling with the same problem. It is therefore not

strange that the paths of these two soon crossed. Born in Freeport,

Maine, 1812, Dennison was just a year older than Howard. He was an

expert watch-repairer and watch-assembler, having learned his craft

among the Swiss and the English workmen in New York and Boston. The

year 1845 found him conducting a small watch and jewelry business in

Boston.

Some few years earlier, Dennison had visited friends in Springfield,

Massachusetts, and while there he was taken to one of the interesting

show-places of the town—the Springfield Arsenal. As he made his slow

progress through the great rifle factory, he marveled at the wonderful

machinery and the system which had originated in the brain of Eli

Whitney nearly half a century before; Whitney was dead and gone, but

his works still lived.

Dennison returned to Boston, fired with an ambition to apply the

Whitney system and methods of rifle-making to the manufacture of

watches. He brooded over the scheme for years, constructing a

pasteboard model of his imaginary watch factory and planning in detail

its organization.

Then occurred a meeting that was to make history—a meeting marking the

first step in founding a great American industry and wresting from

Europe and Great Britain the watch-making monopoly which they had

continuously held since the days of the "Nuremburg Egg." Dennison met

Howard, and the contact of the two minds was like the meeting of flint

and steel. Dennison shared Howard's belief that watch-parts could be

made better and more accurately by the use of machines. He had the

watch-making experience and Howard the mechanical skill to design the

new machinery. One may imagine how the two young men inspired each

other. They had the ideas; all they now needed was the capital and

this was supplied in 1848 by Mr. Samuel Curtis, who backed them to the

extent of twenty thousand dollars.

Dennison immediately went abroad to study methods in England and

Switzerland and came back more than ever convinced of the soundness of

their own ideas.

"I have examined," said he, "watches made by a man whose reputation at

this moment is far beyond that of any other watchmaker in Great Britain

and have found in them such workmanship as I should blush to have it

supposed had passed from under my hands in our own lower grade of work.

Of course I do not mean to say that there is not work in these watches

of the highest grade possible, but errors do creep in and are allowed

to pass the hands of competent examiners. And it needs but slight

acquaintance with our art to discover that the lower grade of foreign

watches are hardly as mechanically correct in their construction as a

common wheelbarrow."

[Illustration: French Enamel Case, about 1800

Austrian Lyre-shaped Watch, 1770

French Musical Repeater Watch, Gold Case, Richly Enameled and Set with

Pearls Presented by Napoleon to Murat in 1800

French, about 1800

Beetle Shaped Watch, about 1800

Guitar Shaped Watch Swiss, about 1800

French Combination of Watch, Snuff Box and Music Box, playing several

tunes, about 1700

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY WATCHES

_Reached the extreme of elaboration and costliness, but were not

always equally successful as time keepers. In the collections of the

Metropolitan Museum._]

On his return, in 1850, he and Howard established themselves in a small

factory in Roxbury, under the name of the American Horologe Company.

And that little factory was the foundation of what is now the great

establishment of the Waltham Watch Company, the first and hence the

oldest watch company in America, and the parent concern of most of the

rest.

It was perhaps at this time that an employee, one P. S. Bartlett,

returned to his home town on a visit and was asked by his old neighbors

what he had been doing.