By Jessica Lewis, Collectors Weekly Staff (Copyright 2009)

Darwin Holmstrom talks about the history of motorcycles, especially Harley-Davidsons. He discusses technological and stylistic innovations and specific break-through models, and the differences between vintage motorcycle collectors and classic car collectors. Darwin has written multiple books on motorcycles and automobiles. His newest, “The Harley-Davidson Motor Co. Archive Collection”, is available online from Motorbooks.

I’ve been a lifelong motorcyclist. I started riding a motorcycle when I was 11, and I started writing for Motorcyclist magazine after I got out of school in the early ’90s. While I was working for them, I wrote a book called The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Motorcycles, which is sort of a motorcycle life manual. I’ve written a bunch of other books since then on cars and motorcycles.

1984 Model FXST Softail

Obviously, if you’re interested in the motorcycle industry and the motorcycle culture of America, Harley-Davidson plays a pretty prominent role, but I’m interested in all sorts of different bikes. I’m actually partial to Victories. They have become very nice motorcycles once they quit being so butt-ugly. They’re not quite as expensive as Harleys, though they’re still not cheap, and they seem extremely well built and very durable. I’ve had nothing but good luck with them. They’re the other American company.

From an intellectual standpoint, I’m impressed with the brilliance of the Harley-Davidson company’s marketing and product positioning. The people at Harley are no dummies. They’ve made a lot of brilliant moves since the buyout from American Machinery and Foundry (AMF), and the most important product that they’ve had since then, the Evolution, was actually commissioned by AMF. Their bikes are beautiful, too. There’s just no denying that they’re the most attractive motorcycles available anywhere.

One of my favorite bikes is the counterbalanced Softails. If I could get that engine in a touring bike with a stiffer frame, I’d have a Harley. As it is right now, you can get a bike like that, but Victory makes it, not Harley. That counterbalanced engine in the Softail is critical to me because I’m a long-distance rider. The non-counterbalanced bikes Harley makes are fine if you don’t put a lot of miles on them. I used to do a lot of marathon-type riding, time-distance rallies, that type of stuff, and if your engine’s not balanced, the bike’s going to shake.

Right now I’m in the process of a year-long recovery from an accident. It was a minor crash last year that should’ve been nothing, but I landed on my knee and pretty much destroyed it. I’m still recuperating from a bad racing crash I had six years ago as well, so right now all I’ve got is an Italian bike that shall remain nameless, but I haven’t licensed it yet. I’m not even sure it’ll start.

Collectors Weekly: What about some of the other bikes you’ve owned?

Holmstrom: I’m critical. I’ve got complaints about all of them. Writing for magazines and stuff like that, you’re always looking for the flaws. It’s like asking a movie critic about their favorite film.

I had a Triumph Sprint, a sport-trim bike that I liked a lot, but it never quite got the fuel injection right. I’ve had some Yamaha sport bikes that I’ve liked, but there were a lot of transmission issues with Yamaha motorcycles. As far as I know, they still have the same issues now.

The last bike that I was just absolutely crazy about was probably a Yamaha I bought as a carryover in 1985. I guess the two bikes that I’ve had that I unequivocally liked the most were a Victory Vegas and a Victory Hammer. I’ve got no real complaints about either one of those.

I also really love the Urals with the sidecars, the Russian bikes. It’s just as hard to ride a Ural sidecar at 55 miles an hour down the highway as it is to ride a high-performance sport bike on a racetrack at 150 miles an hour. There’s a sticker on the gas tank that says, “Warning: Right and left-hand turns can be dangerous,” and it’s got little skull and crossbones on it, which is true. Right-hand and left-hand turns can be extremely dangerous on a sidecar because it’s a totally unstable vehicle, but going straight can be pretty exciting. They’re so counterintuitive, you have to do everything the opposite of what you do in a motorcycle. It’s the same kind of focus you need to ride fast on a racetrack. They’re like time machines. It’s like getting on a brand new motorcycle from 1939.

Sidecars are pretty collectible now, especially BMWs. A really nice classic BMW sidecar costs as much as a new Japanese motorcycle, but that’s a pretty limited market. I wouldn’t buy one for an investment. I wouldn’t buy any vehicle for an investment right now. You just buy it because you like it and it’s fun.

Collectors Weekly: Do collectors ride their bikes?

Holmstrom: A lot of them do. Most of the collectors I know ride up to events and stuff like that. There’s not a whole lot of difference between a BMW from the 1930s and a BMW from the 1960s. They’re pretty simple machines to keep running and they’re pretty well built. Same with Harleys—almost all of the Harleys ever built are still on the road. Very few people junk out their Harleys and throw them away, maybe with the exception of some of the Sportsters from the ’70s.

Collectors Weekly: How did motorcycles evolve?

Holmstrom: The very first internal combustion engine vehicle was two-wheeled and wooden. Gottlieb Daimler was working on a four-stroke engine, and to test it he cobbled together this two-wheeled wooden vehicle. So the history of the motorcycle actually goes back further than the history of cars.

In the early years, motorcycles were fighting with cars as basic transportation. When Henry Ford applied mass-production techniques to the automobile, he brought the price down to the point where the motorcycle could no longer compete because cars are always going to be more practical than motorcycles. So motorcycles went through a period of hard times and evolved as a sport vehicle. Ever since then, the history of motorcycles has been peaks and valleys, booms and busts, right up until today.

Actually, motorcycle sales are holding pretty steady right now. They’re doing much better than car sales. The little scooter markets boomed last year with the rise in gas prices.

Model XS with sidecar

Probably the biggest jump occurred when the baby-boom market became old enough to ride motorcycles. At the same time, the Japanese introduced really accessible motorcycles that were cheap to buy, easy to maintain, and fun to ride. To ride a Harley or one of the British bikes of that period, you really had to be a grease monkey. You pretty much had to know how to overhaul your own engine to even qualify to ride them. Today you can walk into a dealership and buy a Harley that you can ride without having to repair and fix it all the time But back then, it wouldn’t be uncommon to have to do a major repair on your motorcycle the second or third day you owned it.

Honda started importing bikes in 1959, and they really came heavily onto the scene in the early ’60s with the Dreams and Scramblers. Their first big bike was in 1969, the CB 750. At that time, there was also this massive influx of 10 million people hitting the market, the baby boomers. They were entering the age range where they could afford to buy bikes, so they fueled this boom right up into the late ’70s, early ’80s. The number of motorcycle registrations was just phenomenal.

Then they had a big bust in the early ’80s because the baby boomers were all getting older, their kids were growing up, and they were getting too busy to ride motorcycles. By then, motorcycles had gotten so expensive that there weren’t a lot of inexpensive options for young riders to get into the sport. We had a crash that almost took Yamaha out of business, and that’s when Harley was bought out by the group of investors from AMF.

Collectors Weekly: What were some of Harley Davidson’s innovations??

Holmstrom: First of all, they developed a new engine. The Harleys that they sold up until 1984, the Shovelheads and the Sportsters—you know when I said how bad motorcycles used to be? They were still that bad. AMF ramped up production so that Harley was just cranking out motorcycles and the quality suffered. Not only were they running around with 1930s-era engineering, but the quality control was in the toilet. Then they developed the Evolution engine.

It put them on par with where the Japanese were in maybe 1969, but that was good enough because the Japanese bikes of 1969 were really good motorcycles. You can find them today sitting in people’s garages, and you can just put a little oil in them, maybe some new plug wires and a new battery, and then start them up, even if they’ve been in that garage since 1983. They’re very well-built bikes, so that’s not the dig it sounds like, but the Japanese had moved on by 1984 when the Evolution came out. For the first time you could buy a new Harley Sportster and ride it for years and years without any trouble and without needing any special mechanical skills whatsoever.

So first they made Harley-Davidsons accessible. Then they decided to really mine their heritage. In 1984, they made the coolest custom bike anybody had ever seen. It was like the Chopper, only you didn’t have to build it yourself in a garage. Then they came out with the Heritage Softail which looked just like a 1951 Hydra-Glide, which was a very coveted bike. But the Heritage was modern, with all new parts. It ran well and you didn’t have to overhaul it all the time.

What Harley still doesn’t do well is reach young buyers. Harley owners are aging and the company’s attempts to market to younger buyers are painful to watch, frankly. They show people on these custom Harley cruisers with snowboards strapped to their back. If you’re going after the 20-something adrenaline junkie crowd, you’re not going to get them with the bikes that Harley offers, no matter how many cool snowboarding video clips you put on your website. On a good day, a Harley-Davidson is going to crank out maybe 72 horsepower at the rear wheel. A new Yamaha R1 or a GSX-R 1000 Suzuki or a Honda CDR 1000 RR are going to crank out 172 horsepower at the rear wheel.

Collectors Weekly: Do people tend to specialize in their collections?

Holmstrom: I don’t know anybody who only collects Harleys. I know people who just collect BMWs, but they’re a different group of people. They tend to be pretty rigid. But people who collect motorcycles generally collect motorcycles. They might gravitate towards American bikes or towards Italian bikes or German bikes.

Oddly enough, Harleys aren’t the most valuable old collectible bikes. They usually cost more than a Triumph or a BSA, but they’ve always been relatively affordable compared to, say, a Vincent or something like that. I think people are as likely to buy a vintage motorcycle to ride as to collect. They don’t sit and collect dust in museums in collections as much as they are out on the road.

Collectors Weekly: What’s the deal with restoring motorcycles versus leaving them in their original condition?

Holmstrom: You don’t see a lot of what you call time-capsule bikes simply because of the way most of those bikes were built. They pretty much needed to be overhauled every winter.

Everybody modifies their bike, so when the Harley Archives buys a bike that’s from outside, a lot of the work they do is to get rid of the non-stock pieces and bring it back to stock condition. One of the hardest things to do is find stock bikes for Harley calendars because most Harleys have aftermarket seats, windshields, luggage carriers, wheels, chrome, carburetors, pipes, et cetera.

Collectors Weekly: In terms of appearance, do collectors care about things like whitewall tires and chrome or are they more concerned with function?

Holmstrom: If you’re going to restore a bike, you want to make it as correct as possible, so whatever it came with is what you put on it. But like I said, people don’t usually restore them, they modify them. I know more people that are into making period-correct customs than historically accurate restorations. They only use the aftermarket accessories that were available at the time. That’s where some of the really cool bikes come from.

There’s a bike in The Harley-Davidson Collection called the 1942 Model WLA “Russian” Boozefighters Cutdown Replica. That’s an example of a period-correct custom. It has all the different parts that would’ve been available at the time. I know plenty of people who are doing stuff like that.

Collectors Weekly: What is Harley’s long-term impact on the motorcycle industry?

1903 Serial Number One

Holmstrom: They kept the American motorcycle industry going for 50 years. Before World War II, Harley-Davidson was among the world’s greatest technical innovators when it came to motorcycles. Afterward, they became much more conservative, but they were the last surviving American motorcycle company for 50 years.

It wasn’t exactly revolutionary, but in 1936 they came out with an overhead valve, big V-Twin engine that was as good as anything else anybody offered. It was one of the fastest bikes you could buy, probably the fastest bike you could buy that was commonly available in the U.S.—the Knucklehead. After that, there wasn’t a lot of technical innovation until the Evolution came out in 1984. The Evo wasn’t radical, but it broke new ground technologically because it helped make a modern engine out of the traditional one.

Stylistically, Harley invented the Cruiser, the factory concept, and they pretty much invented the heavyweight factory touring bike with their Electra Glide. For a couple of decades, their stylistic innovations were few and far between, but then they came out with things like the Heritage Softail in the ’80s and revitalized the whole motorcycle industry. That was true right up until the early years of this decade.

Collectors Weekly: Could you tell us a bit more about the Knucklehead?

Holmstrom: In the early years of motorcycling and transportation, there were no generally agreed-upon design principles. Everybody made it all up from scratch. The earliest engines were these intake-over-exhaust-types that were so crude, we wouldn’t even recognize them as a gasoline engine today, but that was the leading edge in technology. They were working in a completely different world. We didn’t have the kind of aluminum alloys that we have today. We didn’t understand metallurgy like we do today. You couldn’t make something as precise as you can today.

Plus there were a lot of challenges from the gasoline that was available in the early years. I doubt you could run your lawn mower on it today. There were all kinds of limitations as to what they could do. This whole development of the engine is this interplay between improved production techniques, improved metallurgy, and improved fuels. Each one allowed improvements in other areas, but nobody had a template to go from.

The Knucklehead was a pretty big deal because they had overhead valves. First, they were atmospheric, and then they were mechanical, so they had pushrods and lifters.

The Flathead engine, the side-valve engine, made sense for a while because it was a good, efficient way to get horsepower out of lousy, low-octane fuel. Indian was an early champion of the side-valve engine. Harley’s side valve, their Flatheads, were almost like a distraction for the company during the Depression. Indian was focusing on developing side valves, so Harley went ahead and developed an overhead valve engine, which was cutting-edge technology at the time, and that was the Knucklehead. That was pretty revolutionary. The really hot European bikes were using overhead valve engines, so it was sort of like if Harley made a bike today that was competitive with the fastest Ducati. They were a pretty big deal.

Harley got behind in the postwar years. Because of the rebuilding in Europe, European manufacturers were allocated resources before Harley was, so the company got behind at that point, and then 10 years later, the Japanese came along.

Harley didn’t really catch up until 1984, and they did so by making their own curve. They wisely decided not to compete with the Japanese head-to-head in their own game. They went their own way, which proved to be a way that people wanted to go. There are a lot of people out there who really don’t care about having 172 horsepower in their rear wheel or being able to do a wheelie at 90 miles an hour. Unfortunately, the younger buyers that they’re trying to woo now do.

Collectors Weekly: In your book, you said that Harley raced in the 1900s. Could you tell us a bit more about that?

1975 Model XR-750 Dirt Track Racer

Holmstrom: Harley chose a technological path early on and they stuck with it. It actually lent itself really well to American-style dirt track racing, but they had a road racing effort throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s that was less than successful.

For many years, Harleys were competitive in drag racing—they have the All Harley Drag Racing Association. In 1994, they released the Dragster, and then in 2006, there was the Harley-Davidson V-Rod Destroyer. That was a V-Rod factory drag bike. Anybody with the money could walk in and buy this thing and go drag racing. It does really well in all forms of drag racing.

The area where Harley has been just absolutely dominant throughout history is dirt track racing. The Model XR-750 Dirt Track Racer is still the bike to beat. The low-revving pushrod V-Twin just flat out works for this type of racing. It’s ideal for American-style racing. The Japanese have tried like hell to compete with them. Suzuki made a strong effort, but Harley owns that.

They raced all over. The great thing about dirt track racing is that a lot of the dirt track racetracks are just old horseracing tracks. That’s how it got started in the U.S. They started using these horseracing tracks in fairgrounds all across the country, and that became the American style of racing. It’s very cool to go see. It’s dangerous and I’ve seen way too many people I know get killed, but it’s probably some of the most exciting racing you’ll ever see.

Collectors Weekly: Could you tell us a bit about Harley-Davidson’s involvement with World War I and World War II?

Holmstrom: They made a good decision in World War I. Their involvement was relatively minimal. Indian was the big company up until World War I, and Harley was a distant second. When the war started, Indian decided to basically abandon the civilian market to focus on the military market. Harley sold bikes to the military as much as they could, but they didn’t abandon their civilian bikes. They still developed and built bikes for the public and they surged ahead in civilian sales at that time. From then on, it was all downhill for Indian.

During World War II, they didn’t have a choice. The government had shut everything down to focus on war development. They sold a lot of bikes to the military, but then Jeeps came along and pretty much ended the need for military motorcycles. Anybody could drive a Jeep, but you had to know how to ride a motorcycle.

The 1942 Model WLA was the main bike that Harley built for the war, and then there was the Model XA, which was a bike they developed to military specifications—it looks like a BMW. They made over a thousand of them before the army canceled the contract.

Then there was the Model XS with a sidecar, which was a prototype they developed. They only built three of them because the military came out with the Jeep about the time they were developing it and they didn’t need it anymore.

Collectors Weekly: What are some other prototypes that were never released?

Holmstrom: There was the 1975 Model OHC-1100 Experimental, which is one of my personal favorite bikes. The thing that strikes me about this bike is that a couple of years later, Yamaha came out with a bike, the Virago, that’s got so many of the same design features as this, it almost looks like somebody from Harley smuggled the engineering drawings out over to Yamaha. The technology is so similar, it’s almost hard to believe it’s a coincidence. Harley is obviously not accusing Yamaha of stealing their design, but I personally think Harley would’ve had a comeback 10 years earlier than they did if they had made that bike.

1949 Hydra Glide

Another prototype that’s just absolutely amazing is the 1981 Nova Mock-Up with a liquid-cooled V-4 engine—like a Honda Gold Wing—developed in conjunction with Porsche. They never made that either, although a lot of the development of this eventually ended up in the V-Rod.

They have a lot of prototypes that were never produced, but most aren’t as striking as these. They’re just variations of whatever they were already making. In a way, they made the right choice, because they decided to focus on a more traditional bike, like the 1984 Model FXST Softail. This was where their market was at. They would’ve been competing head-to-head with the Japanese if they had made that Nova. They would’ve been having comparison tests between this and the Gold Wing, and the Gold Wing would probably beat it incrementally just because it’s Honda.

There had never been anything like the Softail before. There had never been a bike with this kind of styling. It had all the attributes of a Harley-Davidson that people lusted after in a modern, user-friendly package. If you look at the 1983 Model FXDG Disc Glide and then look at the Softail, it doesn’t seem to be that huge of a difference. But if you look at the engine, the Disc Glide has more in common with a 1936 Knucklehead than it does with that 1984 Softail. They went from 1936 technology to 1970 technology. That modern technology put the Heritage Softail in a motorcycle that looked like it could have been made in 1950.

Collectors Weekly: What are some of the most collectible Harleys?

Holmstrom: If you want to talk about the ultimate collectible vehicle, look at the 1903 Serial Number One. That’s the first Harley motorcycle and they only made three of them. How do you put a value on that? I don’t think you can describe it with any word but priceless. I bet if you went up to the Harley-Davidson archives with $15 million in cash, they’d just laugh at you. This may well be one of the most valuable vehicles ever made.

Usually the stuff you see changing hands is stuff more like a 1949 Hydra-Glide. The 1934 and 1935 Model VLD used to be relatively cheap. I lost track of the collectors’ motorcycle market the last six or seven years, but back then you could pick up a really nice bike like that for about $10,000, which is not bad. I’ve seen one low-mile original Knucklehead go for $36,000. It was all original with 300 or 400 miles on it; one of these time-capsule vehicles. That was the highest I’ve ever seen a Harley go for, but just your run-of-the-mill Vincent would have gone for that much.

There’s just a different attitude about Harleys. I think people look at Harleys as bikes to ride, whereas a Vincent is a bike to behold in a state of aesthetic arrest. Most end up as custom bikes, which is why you don’t see so many old Harleys being bought and sold by the original-air-in-the-tire crowd.

Customizing is a pretty personal thing. None of the constructs that apply to the collector market really apply to the culture that surrounds custom bikes. You’re more likely to find a bike like the 1973 Model FLH-1200 Electra Glide Rhinestone Harley-Davidson, customized by Margaret and Russ Townsend and covered in red, white, and blue rhinestones and lights, than you are to find a bike that looks like the standard 1968 Model FLHFB Electra Glide. So when you talk about the collector market and try to apply values as if you were talking about a sports car, even a British Triumph or Norton, it’s all apples and oranges. This market and this culture are so different.

Collectors Weekly: What type of people tend to collect and customize vintage motorcycles?

Holmstrom: They’re curmudgeonly and stubborn. I’d say your average motorcycle collector is unmarried and has at least one ex-wife. You should go to an antique motorcycle club gathering sometime. You’ll see the most eclectic, bizarre, fetishishtic collection of machinery that could ever be gathered in one place. And there’s no categorizing the people. You’ll see everything from hippies to tweed-cap Brit expatriates who used to fly spitfires during the Great War. They defy pigeonholing. The car collecting community is much more homogenous.

There are shows all over the country, and sometimes they’ll have a theme. One year’s theme might be prewar British bikes, and they might have a special section set aside for people to display their prewar British bikes, but it’ll still be the same eclectic hodgepodge of miscellaneous cool bikes that it always is. Sometimes they have a theme because it’ll help people decide which bike to bring. It’s like, “Should I bring my Ducati round case Devil Drive or my pristine sand-cast 1969 750 Honda?” People tend to have multiple bikes because it’s a lot easier to stick a whole bunch of bikes in your garage than it is cars without the neighbors knowing what kind of a psychotic freak you really are.

Collectors Weekly: What should new collectors look for?

Holmstrom: Look for whatever makes you happy. Even if you get a vehicle that depreciates—and this is true of cars or motorcycles or guitars or whatever—look for whatever makes you happy. In the end, it’s what thrills you that counts. It might be a 1971 Pontiac GTO instead of the cool 1968 or ’69 that everybody else wants. If you’re going into this as an investment, you’re going to end up like the banks that bought adjustable-rate mortgages—you might get lucky, but most likely you’re going to get hosed. Buy something because you love it. It doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks about it, whether they think it’s corny or stupid. You love it and that’s why you have it. It makes you happy, and ideally it’s something you have fun using.

Collectors Weekly: Are vintage Harley-Davidsons popular worldwide?

1975 Model OHC-1100 Experimental

Holmstrom: Harley does have a following worldwide, but it’s mostly in the U.S. The Chopper custom bike crowd is much bigger than the Harley crowd. Harleys don’t really lend themselves well to youths in Europe because even the new and improved ones are still air-cooled pushrod V-Twins, and they don’t like to be hammered down the Autobahn at 135 miles an hour for 45 minutes straight. You will pretty much blow your engine up if you try to keep up with traffic. By and large, they’re much more performance-oriented. It’s a different world. We have a lot more wide open spaces and lot more relaxed places here than Europe does.

I’ve put well over 50,000 miles on Harley engines. I’ve been stuck in a lot of deserts and cities, hot freeway traffic and stop-and-go traffic, and every single time that it happens, the engine seems like it’s had a little life taken out of it. There’s a reason that cars aren’t air-cooled anymore. That’s why they came out with the V-Rod. It’s going to become increasingly hard to meet emission standards with air-cooled engines.

Honestly, the one thing Harleys do better than anything else—and this is very important—is look good. No other bike is as good-looking as a Harley. Functionally, they’re as good as any other bike using similar technology.

Collectors Weekly: What are some good resources for people who are just starting to get interested in vintage motorcycles?

Holmstrom: My book, The Harley-Davidson Motor Co. Archive Collection, is terrific, because if you’re serious about restoring Harleys, you’re never going to find this much information or photography in one place. I also edited a book on BMW bikes called The Art of BMW Motorcycles. It’s got studio photography of really beautiful BMWs from the very early years up to the most recent ones. BMW motorcycles is a big collecting area, too, but maybe I’m biased because I live in a BMW market. Around here, near Minneapolis, I know more people who collect BMWs than Harleys.

The Antique Motorcycle Club of America has a really good website with everything you need to know about upcoming shows, and then there’s the American Historic Motorcycle Racing Association, AHRMA.org.

Collectors Weekly: Thanks for talking with us today, Darwin.

(All images in this article courtesy Darwin Holmstrom and his book “The Harley-Davidson Motor Co. Archive Collection” available online from Motorbooks.)

By Maribeth Keane and Jessica Lewis, Collectors Weekly Staff (Copyright 2009)

Australian thimble aficionado Sue Gowan talks about her passion for sewing thimbles, from hand-painted Royal Worcesters to plastic ones. She discusses the history of thimble making, the various materials used, the different design styles employed, and their collectibility. Sue can be contacted via her website, Thimbleselect of Australia , which is a member of our Hall of Fame.

My husband, Mike, used to buy me pieces of china. One day he bought me a Jasperware blue Wedgwood thimble and I put it aside with my other pieces of Wedgwood. Later, one of his aunts left us a silver thimble, and then my daughter got a christening thimble, and it just flew from there. I don’t sew, so I don’t why.

James Fenton is known for his blackberry designs - here with an all over pattern of leaves with the berries. There are also stylised berries on the apex. Marked with size 12,"JF" maker's mark, assay mark for Birmingham 1921.

You can’t collect in a vacuum, so I looked for a society to join. I lived in South Africa at that time, and Jenny Scharff had just started her South African Thimble Collectors Club. That was 25 years ago, and the passion has never ceased.

By American standards, my collection is quite small. I have about 2,500 thimbles, but they don’t take up a lot of space. I always collected postcards when I traveled, but then I started looking for thimbles instead. I dabble in lots of little things, but since 1984, my passion has been thimbles.

The biggest part of my collection is Australian thimbles. Once I got to Australia, I read an article on Australian thimbles, and because it was all new to me, I started to try to find them. It was a way of getting to know my new country. I try to get one from each manufacturer.

I wrote a book, Thimbles of Australia, and I started collecting a lot more Australian thimbles once I began writing because I knew what to look for. The book came out in 1988 and 11 years later, there’s still nothing really new on the topic. I never set out to write a book, but I just didn’t know how else to keep the passion going.

Thimble collectors are amazing people and they share enormously.

My other big thing is joining local groups. Once I left the club in South Africa, I joined the Australian equivalent. In the meantime, I joined the really big international group, Thimble Collectors International, which is based in the States. I’ve been a member of that for over 20 years now. You get wonderful bulletins and that’s how you learn.

I also belong to the club in the U.K., which is where I’ve met most of my thimble friends. They come and stay with me and I go and stay with them. We talk the same language when it comes to thimbles.

In addition to Australian thimbles, my other big passions are English Victorian silver thimbles and the hand-painted Royal Worcester thimbles. The phenomenal detail of the early hand-painted Royal Worcester thimbles makes them a fine art commodity and the prices keep going higher and higher. You don’t even need a magnifying glass to see the detail on them. It’s just so amazing. They stopped painting them in 1986.

Getting familiar with the backmarks and hallmarks leads to a wider interest. I’ve always known how to read a hallmark, which can tell you whether a thimble is made of Sterling silver and who the maker is. Then you start to see patterns emerging of all the different kinds of thimbles from that maker, and how different makers copied each other. I suppose it’s just that never-ending quest. You’re always looking for just one more.

There are early plastic thimbles, too, and they were all a cream color because they were trying to replicate bone and ivory. Those were made during the 19th century and into the 20th. They’re becoming scarce now. There are also thimbles made out of something called ivorine, which is a creamy color, too.

I know a lot of people won’t collect Sterling silver if it’s got a hole in it, but thimbles were made to be used, so what’s the point of a sewing tool that was never used? Silver is very soft, so with any kind of hard use—and I’m especially talking about the Victorian thimbles—it’s too soft, especially if it’s the same person using it because you tend to press on the same place every time, so you’d put a hole in it. Every time you use it after that, the tip of the needle would prick or hurt your finger, so that thimble is then useless to you, but you could swap with someone else because she will never find that same hole. We all sew differently.

If you look at the tip of your fingers, they’re not round, but thimbles were always made in a perfect circle because they’re machine made. So if you take a thimble that has been used, you’ll see it goes to what we call “out of round”—it’s become a finger shape. This is again that whole history of sewing and the women handing down their tools from mother to daughter and grandmother to granddaughter. In the 19th century, women were sewing all the time. It wasn’t a necessity—they did it for recreation. There was beautiful embroidery. So thimbles are tools.

Collectors Weekly: How long ago did people start using thimbles?

A very early pictorial Victorian s/s thimble showing the Menai bridge in wonderful detail on a very wide band and all round. Note the tall elegant narrow shape which typifies the earlier Victorian silver thimbles. A very rare thimble.

Gowan: We know of two stone thimbles, one in the Cairo museum and one in the Metropolitan Museum. We’re looking at 2,000 B.C. Obviously, those are unbelievable.

The ones that you see most probably came along the Silk Route. We haven’t found anything that we can authenticate from China, but they would’ve come along the trade routes from the East and into Istanbul and through to the West. There’s no trace whatsoever of Roman thimbles, so we don’t know what they used to protect their fingers, probably something like leather.

My earliest thimble is from the 16th century. If you look at a modern thimble nowadays, it’s made up of an opening to put your finger in, then around the sides and the top is the apex. You’ve got little dimples on the shape of the thimble so that a needle would fit into that hole to help with the pushing. Only in the 1680s, in Germany,did they have a machine to start making those mechanically. Before then, they had all been hand-beaten. So I can look at a thimble today and know its era—before 1700 or after 1700—just from the way it was made.

They had a guild of thimble makers in Nuremberg in the 14th and 15th centuries, and they saved the paperwork from medieval Germany. Holland had a big history of thimble making long before it ever got to England, too. Europe was really the cradle, and mechanized thimbles were made in the 1690s by John Lofting in England.

Most of those would be bronze, brass, the base metals. The old silver thimbles are now in museums. The beautiful early English handmade thimbles are very tall. Look at your knuckles—your thimble must never go past where your knuckle ends. It should fit so that you can almost touch the end when you put your finger in it. It doesn’t really work if your finger doesn’t touch the end because you don’t have control of the tool. If you’re going to use it, the size is very important.

A tailor wouldn’t have had a top in his thimble at all; there would’ve been no apex because they sewed using the sides of their thimbles. If it was big enough, you could put your finger straight through. It’s a much quicker movement.

Collectors Weekly: Are thimbles still being manufactured?

Gowan: They are. Of all the big Victorian manufacturers, James Swann was the last English firm to fold, and that was in this decade. Charles Iles started in the 1850s and closed in 1990. He never made Sterling, only base metal, which were everyday working thimbles, but he was very innovative. I love his thimbles. He patented and registered new designs.

Another fabulous seller was a guy called Charles Horner. He was a silversmith in Halifax, England in the 1880s. He saw people paying a sixpence for all these beautiful Sterling silver thimbles that would get holes in them and then be of no use, so in 1884, he patented a new way of making them. It’s like a sandwich: he took two pieces of silver, and in the middle he had a piece of steel. Try sewing through steel! But it still looks beautiful because it’s got Sterling on the outside. He’s still in the market.

He called his thimble the Dorcas, which was a name familiar to Victorian women who sewed because the sewing circles in Victorian times were Dorcas sewing circles. They sewed for the poor. Horner put the Dorcas thimble in a box and said that it had an unconditional guarantee. I think he was just the most incredible marketer in the 1880s and he stole the market. He doubled the price. He went from one sixpence and doubled it to a shilling. And because he registered all the designs he used, no other thimble maker could make the same kind until 1921.

Horner stopped making Dorcas thimbles in 1947, but you could still find them in haberdashery stores in Australia in the 1970s. That’s how successful he was. There are collectors who will specialize in getting one of every size and every pattern. He marked his thimbles. Before Dorcas, he just called them PAT for patent.

It’s these little stories and the history that are so important to thimble collectors.

Collectors Weekly: Could you tell me a bit about the history of Australian thimbles?

Charles Horner Left: Hallmarked with 6 for size, maker's mark "CH", assay marks for Chester 1904. The pierced rim is made up of stars, which gives a great sparkling effect Right: An early Dorcas thimble which is steel-cored sterling silver. This has the pre-Dorcas marking of "Pat." for patent and the size #5. The design is a registered one in 1893 known as 'Shell.'

Gowan: Because we were an English colony, many of our thimbles traveled with people when we had the big migration into Australia. It was only in the 1920s that Australia started its own small thimble making business, and that only lasted for 20 years. Not even 20, probably just 15.

They stopped making thimbles because of World War II. Most of the silversmiths weren’t only making thimbles. They were jewelry manufacturers, and thimbles would’ve been a small part of their output. As most of the thimble makers were in England, I don’t think Australian makers could have ever survived by making just thimbles. Charles Horner also made hatpins, for example.

A lot of plastic thimbles were made here. We can identify those, and Australian metal thimbles as well, but they never used the word “Australia.”

There are some collectors who will only collect modern china thimbles. They’re not interested in the history, but there’s nothing wrong with that. I absolutely love the Wedgewoods, the Royal Worcesters, the Royal Crown Derby, and Royal Doulton, but they stopped making them. It just wasn’t economic. Because they were making them for a collectibles market, they couldn’t be used, and for something to really exist, to keep perpetuating itself, it has to have a practical use as well.

Collectors Weekly: Who are some of the other big manufacturers well known for their thimbles?

Gowan: In the U.S., it’s a firm called Simons. They’re based in Philadelphia, and as far as I know, they’re the only major thimble company still going worldwide. The other companies are very small. There are small niche makers, but nobody with a name like Simons anymore.

In the 19th century in America, you had Ketcham & McDougall, Simons, and Webster. To me, Ketcham & McDougall made the most beautiful thimble. The American thimbles are much shorter than their equivalent in the U.K. If you put a whole lot of thimbles in front of me, say 10 of each, I could pick them out and put 10 on one side and 10 on the other. The American ones are much shorter and their marks are normally up inside the apex.

In England, they’re all hallmarked. The four major makers were Charles Horner, Henry Griffith, James Swann, and James Fenton, who is one of my favorites. In Germany, you had the Gabler brothers, who were head and shoulders above everybody else. Germany and Austria were major thimble producers, especially in the first 40 years of the 20th century. In Vienna, there was a company called Settmacher, and it only just closed in 2005 because the owner died.

Collectors Weekly: Why were German and Austrian thimble makers so successful?

Settmacher. Made of aluminium with a band showing ostriches in black. 'Austria' is lettered into the indentations. From the 1920s

Gowan: You have to have what everybody is looking for. People want something decorative, but it still has to be practical. I suppose it’s just like anything—the bigger the company, the more they turn out, the more they take the market. The smaller companies were squeezed out; family businesses died out.

Again, World War II changed so much. Before World War II, people were generally still making most of their clothing themselves, but off-the-rack clothing came in after World War II, so there wasn’t the need to sew as much. You could pick up a plastic thimble and you didn’t have to pay $20. A plastic one would do for the kind of sewing you needed.

Sterling thimbles had a different purpose in prim-and-proper Victorian times. Back then, you could not just go out with a girl without a chaperone. The thimble became a part of dating. If a young man offered a girl a gift of a silver thimble and she accepted it, he knew that his feelings were reciprocated. If he gave her a utilitarian, base-metal thimble, he was expecting her to be a housewife, but if he gave her a beautiful jeweled gold thimble, he was expecting her to be the lady of the manor.

Collectors Weekly: If the thimble has jewels or gold, is it harder to use?

Gowan: It depends how they’ve been set. Some look like a ring that’s got a ruby or diamond, but they can be recessed flat enough. You just need a very good jeweler, someone who knows how it’s going to be used. There’s a gold thimble that’s studded with diamonds and rubies and sapphires that has changed hands several times and is worth a lot of money now, but it’s useless for sewing.

There’s a whole subset called gadget thimbles which help you cut your thread. You know how on the back of a sewing machine you’ve got a little cutter? Well, there are dozens of different thimble makers who have patented designs to help you thread a needle and cut the thread just by using your thimble.

I do lots of thimble talks, and I go to conferences all the time. I love talking about them. If people want to see my collection, I bring it with me. I know that they’re overwhelmed just to see the size of the collection. If they wanted to see my German thimbles or my Dorcas thimbles or my hand-painted ones, that’s no problem at all, but normally the general public isn’t interested in such things.

Collectors Weekly: What are some of the different materials that thimbles have been made of?

Gowan: I have a wooden thimble that my mother used to make my wedding dress. She bought it in 1930. That’s my most treasured possession because she used it.

That was the era when wood was what was available. In the 19th century, it would’ve been brass and silver. They would never have made them in the modern materials. Plastic only came into use at the turn of the 20th century. We take it for granted because a plastic thimble is one of the most comfortable to use.

Collectors Weekly: Were all thimbles marked with a maker’s mark or a hallmark?

Simons marked up in the apex with "S" maker's mark - they still produce thimbles in Philadelphia - with a panelled, gold band over sterling silver - from 1880s.

Gowan: Each country had their own law. In England, they changed the law in 1884. It went on the weight of the silver. Before 1884, it wasn’t a legal requirement, so there weren’t any marks on any of the English silver, probably with an exception of 20 thimbles. Horner was starting to use hallmarks at that time, but after 1884, his thimbles had to bear a hallmark because it had to show that it was made of 925 parts out of a thousand of silver. It was an honesty thing. If you’re only using 900 parts and selling it as Sterling silver, you’re committing fraud, so that’s why they have the hallmarking system.

For the base-metal thimble, there’s no requirement whatsoever, but a thimble says “Made in England,” it was made after the 1890s. It’s all to do with governments and lawmakers, just to get more money.

In America, they marked the size of thimbles from the 1890s. Simons, Ketcham & McDougall also used a maker’s mark,  S or KMD. Some just used a symbol such as a star. They would have to register it, so we can go back through the registrations and find out who registered the symbol, what they made, and when the registration took place.

That’s why I’ve got such a big section devoted to marks on my website. The books written on thimbles are so general. There isn’t a book just written on Royal Worcester thimbles, but there are millions of books on Royal Worcester. There are millions of books on Wedgwood, but there’s nothing on Wedgwood thimbles. That’s why I’ve got all these little topics on my website, because I know there isn’t information on specific makers. And thimble collectors are so generous. They share and share and share. I get daily e-mails from collectors saying, “This is some information you didn’t know about,” or “Can you help me?” and we share back and forth. I’ve learned heaps and they’ve learned heaps. It’s just great. Thimble collectors are amazing people and they share enormously.

Collectors Weekly: In England, did they ever make thimbles out of bone or porcelain, or was it mainly silver?

Gowan: Up until 1900, everything was made of metal. They had to be strong and sturdy to use, so if they were making for the everyday market, they would’ve been making them out of brass or steel (iron is too harsh). If they used Sterling, it had to be pure 925 Sterling silver. Anything other than metals was after the 20th century.

You can divide the 19th century into three parts thimble-wise. Up until about 1820, everything was in ivory, beautiful and old. The mother of pearl thimbles came from France. They were called Palais Royal, and to own a thimble made out of that, you needed a very deep pocket. They were also made out of tortoise shell, but we’re talking about the high end, the Rolls Royce of thimbles.

After that, you moved to mother of pearl proper. There are lots of beautiful sewing boxes from the middle of the 19th century, and all the tools have handles of mother of pearl. In the third part of the 19th century, they went to bone. Materials like tortoise shell and mother of pearl became too exotic and too expensive to work with.

Collectors Weekly: What about more recent thimble trends?

Australian Thimbles Left: Modern s/s by Syd Oats of South Australia. The apex is of Lapis Lazuli stone. Right: An "AUSSIE" - nothing known about it, other than it is marked "StS SL." A very rare thimble

Gowan: I think there’s a big divide between thimbles made before and after 1970. That’s when people started to seriously collect thimbles. In the late 1970s, china manufacturers got on the bandwagon and started producing china thimbles. They’re not practical. You can’t use them because if you drop it, it’ll break. It’s for the collectibles market.

The heyday of china thimbles was the 1980s. Every cup manufacturer who made anything out of china started to make thimbles—Royal Worcester, Wedgwood, Spode, Royal Doulton. Then of course Lady Diana married Prince Charles, and I think there were a minimum of 50 different manufacturers all over the world who made thimbles for that occasion. When the Queen turned 80, there were probably three thimbles issued for that. It’s just supply and demand. So these are some of the trends that I’ve seen.

I think Sutherland still makes china thimbles in England today, but there are very few companies now. In this century, they just can’t turn a profit. Initially, they would make 10,000 of a particular china thimble. Now you’re lucky if they make a run of 50. It’s just changing demand.

Collectors Weekly: Some thimbles have little paintings on them, flowers, birds, vases. Were those hand-painted or machine-made?

Gowan: Very rarely hand-painted. They’re transfers put on by machines. Someone has to design them first, and often they would’ve been hand-painted designs, and then from the hand painting it became a transfer. Then those transfers become common property. There are some designs that you’ll see every manufacturer use. They’ll make the basic china thimble and then just apply generic patterns.

Some people will want to try and collect every kind of violet that has ever appeared on a thimble and it doesn’t matter who the manufacturer was. Sometimes someone like Royal Albert will have four or five different patterns because they match their tea services. They’re not going to create these patterns just for thimbles.

So there are people who collect only modern thimbles, and some of them spend hundreds of dollars. That’s definitely a trend. If you were collecting before 1970, there were only the earlier thimbles to collect—plastic, brass, steel, Sterling silver, and then the earlier ivory, mother of pearl, et cetera. Nowadays, most thimble collectors just collect china.

Collectors Weekly: What about sets?

Royal Worcester. Left: Unmarked and unsigned 1870s handpainted robin RW thimble of translucent porcelain. Right: Modern handpainted signed fruit by Joan Rayner. The thimble dates between 1964-1986, when RW ceased making h/p thimbles

Gowan: Sets are a modern phenomenon. Originally, thimbles were made to be used, but if they could incorporate a beautiful design, they would. It’s a marketing thing. Sets are from the 1980s and onwards. I’ve never collected sets. I don’t want 25 thimbles with just a different flower on each.

The thimble collecting phenomenon that we know today certainly did not exist until recently. There used to be little aluminum advertising thimbles for Ford and General Motors. There were plastic thimbles that said “Vote for Nixon” or “Vote for Gerald Ford.” There were giveaways. For every washing powder or cup of tea in the 1920s, there was a free thimble available. They were very smart because they were targeting the person who bought: the housewife. They would give her a free thimble which she could use. There were millions doing that, and today that’s a huge collecting field.

So thimbles were meant to be used, but they were also made for advertising. Plastic and aluminum were so cheap to produce, so that phenomenon really took off.

In Australia, there are probably 25 brands that appeared on aluminum advertising thimbles. We didn’t make them—they were made in Germany and England, but they were for Australian products. Yours would’ve been the same. You would have had a lot of advertising thimbles in America, but most of them would’ve been made in Germany and Austria.

Collectors Weekly: What are the most collectible, sought-after thimbles?

Gowan: I’ve got several friends who are passionate about their thimbles, and most of them collect hand-painted Royal Worcester thimbles. They started making them in the 1870s, and stopped in 1986, so that’s 100 years worth of thimbles. Sterling silver thimbles are also very collectible.

Collectors Weekly: Do all thimbles come in boxes or was that something special?

Gowan: Most of the modern china or porcelain ones come in boxes. If you want to resell them, keep the boxes.

The Dorcas all came in beautiful little cases. Those are the ones with steel in them. That’s a whole new collecting world. Little cardboard boxes were the norm, but if you look at the bottom of my Royal Albert page, it shows all the modern boxes that we’ve been able to track.

The boxes often weren’t made for a particular thimble, but they were thimble boxes. So if you were buying a present, you could buy a thimble box to put it in. Some people think I’m crazy. I’ve got all these boxes of boxes, but to me if I can pass on a gift that comes in the original packaging, it’s very nice.

Collectors Weekly: What advice do you have for new collectors?

Gowan: You have to follow your interest, for a start. So if you’re a very outdoorsy person, you follow a theme. If you know a lot about trees, there must be 300 different thimbles with a picture of a tree on it, and if you can identify it as an oak tree or bamboo, that can become a very beautiful collection because it’s very specific to you. If you only love things to actually sew with because you do beautiful embroidery, then you’re probably going to be attracted to thimbles that that you can wear. If you are that sort of collector, your choice of thimbles will be guided by the size of your fingers.

It’s really hard. It’s like saying what kind of cake should I buy. It depends on your taste. I don’t think you can ever impose your own preferences on someone else.

Collectors Weekly: How many sizes do thimbles usually come in?

Gowan: A standard English thimble tends to be a size 7 if you’re buying Charles Horner. If you’re buying Henry Griffith, it’s a 16 because he used millimeter sizes on an inside measurement. So there’s no one sizing standard, although each manufacturer will use the same standard. I always tell people to find a plastic thimble that fits them and then they can tell me the size in millimeters. I can find one for them from there.

They even made small silver childrens’ thimbles. I’ve seen them made by Fenton, Charles Horner, Griffith, hallmarked English Sterling silver, 1904, 1907. But what child with a finger that small can sew? The truth is, they can’t. By the time you can sew, your fingers are almost adult sized.

Collectors Weekly: Is there anything else you would like to say about collecting thimbles?

Gowan: You would not become a collector of anything if there is not a collector inside you. There are only two types in the world: you’re either a collector or you’re not. There’s no half collector or half non-collector. We’ve all got our own silly things. Mine happened to be thimbles.

Collectors Weekly: Thank you, Sue, for taking the time to talk with us about thimbles.

(All images in this article courtesy Sue Gowan of Thimbleselect of Australia).

By Maribeth Keane and Jessica Lewis, Collectors Weekly Staff (Copyright 2009)

Andy Lustig talks about collecting U.S. coins, especially pattern coins, pre-production prototypes struck to test new design concepts. He discusses how these coins have entered the market and which are the most collectible. Based in New York, Andy can be contacted via his website, USPatterns.com, which is a member of our Hall of Fame.

I started collecting coins when I was five years old, and I started dealing when I was 13 or 14. Most kids start with coins of circulation—I had albums for Jefferson nickels, Lincoln pennies and Roosevelt dimes. I started with Morgan and Peace dollars pretty early. I came close to finishing a set of Peace dollars, I was one coin away. That’s the closest I ever got to completing a collection of anything in my life. But I quickly moved into all kinds of other coins from around the world. I bought my first pattern when I was 13.

This four dollar coin is Charles Barber's Flowing hair design in gold, one of about 20 believed to exist. Photo courtesy of Bowers and Merena via uspatterns.com.

Now I buy, sell and collect coins from the U.S. and all over the world. Most collectors specialize in coins from their own country. They might casually collect a few odds and ends from other places, but they focus on their coins. There are exceptions, but I’d say only five to 10 percent of the collectors out there pay serious attention to things other than their own countries’ coins.

I actually began collecting by necessity. I kept seeing things that I wanted to buy, but the only way I could get more money to buy them was to sell other things, so I just constantly bought and sold. It didn’t take long to figure out that it wasn’t going to be sustainable, and I wasn’t going to be able to keep on doing that unless I started to sell the coins profitably. Within about a year of dabbling in coins, I was setting up at coin shows as a full dealer. I think I had my first table at 14, maybe 15 at the latest. It was in the basement of a shopping mall, but it was a pretty good little local show.

Collectors Weekly: Could you tell us a bit about USPatterns.com?

Lustig: Three other collectors and I decided we needed to set up some sort of website to expose the world to patterns, and we decided to do it as an online club, although it didn’t really develop into as much of a club as we had hoped. We set up a page where members could list themselves and their e-mail addresses and post their want lists. There are portions of the site that we set up so that collectors could get in touch with each other and dealers could get in touch with the collectors who were serious about patterns. That developed in a small way, but what really blossomed was the site itself as an information resource. The person that gets most of the credit for that is Saul Teichman, who is probably the number-one researcher of U.S. patterns. He’s also a collector. He’s probably written 95 percent of what’s on the website. He’s also very actively involved in editing the Judd book, which is essentially a guidebook to United States pattern coins.

Collectors Weekly: What attracted you to patterns?

Lustig: When I was 13 years old, I read an article, I believe it was in COINage Magazine. It told the story of patterns and illustrated coins that I couldn’t have imagined would exist, let alone be available to collectors. But here was this article, telling me all about these coins that were extremely rare but not even that expensive. Back then, in 1973, I learned that you could buy extremely rare pattern coins for $200 to $300, which was unfathomable to me. I thought, “I have to go out and get one.” So I did, and then I bought another and another and another.

I liked the history of the piece and the idea that coins don’t just bring you back to the Mint—they bring you back to the meeting rooms at the Mint where they discussed what they were going to strike next. The designers came up with all kinds of possibilities.

The Mint always had engravers on staff who would come up with new designs. Sometimes the designs were at their own initiative, sometimes they were the result of a specific request. Some of the designs were experimental in nature, others raised artistic issues or had to do with format.

For example, in 1849, the United States Mint started striking one-dollar gold pieces for circulation. They had a very small diameter because there wasn’t much gold in them. People complained about the coins being difficult to handle and easy to lose, so the Mint had a couple different options. One of them was to increase the coin’s diameter by putting a hole in the middle, so it still contained a dollar’s worth of gold, but it would be easier to handle.

The option they ended up adopting was to make a much thinner coin with a larger diameter, which also had just a dollar’s worth of gold in it. Pattern collectors prefer the gold dollar from 1852 with a hole in the middle.

Collectors Weekly: So they would make actual patterns of coins and then choose the one they wanted to use?

Lustig: Sometimes it was a matter of putting them next to each other and picking one out. Other times it was a matter of coming up with a design and then continually tweaking it until they got it right. A lot of times they would come up with a design and then decide to do nothing like it, so the only way to collect a piece like that is to buy the pattern. In the world of patterns, if there are 30 to 50 known pieces, it’s a common pattern.

Collectors Weekly: What kind of situation would warrant 50 patterns to be made?

Lustig: They might bring a number of patterns to Congress and say, “Do you like this one or do you like that one?” For example, in 1873, the United States started production on what they called the trade dollar, which was a silver coin. It was struck to a more international weight standard than the silver dollar, and the coin was meant for circulation or for export primarily to Asia.

The Mint produced a number of designs that were seriously considered. In the end, there were six silver trade dollars, each of which they probably made 60 to 100 pieces. Some of these went into sets, which were either shown off to key people in Congress or given for presentation purposes to key people. They’d say, “These are the six designs we’re considering. What do you think?”

Then, of course, just one design goes into circulation, but the pattern coins still exists. Coins of that rarity are surprisingly affordable. You can buy one for $2,500 for an average piece, up to maybe $10,000 for a really nice one. Those numbers aren’t overwhelming to a lot of pattern coin collectors.

Collectors Weekly: Are some patterns more rare than others?

Second prototype for the Morgan dollar with 3 leaves on the olive branch. Photo courtesy of Michael S. Fey, Ph.D. via uspatterns.com.

Lustig: There are lots of unique coins and many more where only two or three exist. The most valuable of all is the 1849 20-dollar gold piece. There’s only one piece that’s known to exist, which is in the Smithsonian, although there is a second piece that’s rumored to be out there somewhere. If I had to bet, I’d say it does exist, but it’s never come to market publicly. If the Smithsonian’s piece came to market today, it would probably bring $15 million. That’s probably the most expensive U.S. coin.

The second most expensive pattern is a 1907 Indian head 20-dollar gold piece struck in gold, which is also unique. It used to belong to Teddy Roosevelt, and it was designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The coin last sold for $475,000, I believe, in the early to mid-1980s. After a couple of private transactions, it ended up in a major collection of 20-dollar gold pieces. If it were to be sold today, it would probably bring $8 million to $10 million.

In 1879, the United States considered making a four-dollar gold piece. They struck two different designs, the more common of which is the flowing-hair design. They made 415 pieces in gold. It’s an especially rare coin and extremely desirable because it’s a gold pattern and it’s a denomination that was never struck for circulation, so it’s a fun coin. The only way you can go out and find a four-dollar gold piece is to buy one of these patterns.

These coins start at $50,000 for a coin that’s barely recognizable, and they could go up to $200,000 for a nice piece, more if you found one of the finest. And they are available.

Collectors Weekly: Are new patterns still being made?

Lustig: Back in the late 1850s through 1885, the U.S. Mint made lots of patterns for sale to the collector market. They went to local dealers and insiders. They all had access to these coins. And you could go to the Mint and request not only coins and patterns of the current year but even some of the older stuff. If they had the dies lying around, the Mint would even restrike coins for you. Fortunately for collectors today—or, depending on your perspective, it might be unfortunate—there weren’t that many people playing that game back then.

That went on for a while, and then in 1885, a new director of the Mint came in and essentially shut down the souvenir shop. You couldn’t buy patterns out of the back of the shop anymore. Since then, very few patterns have been made available, and even fewer have made their way out of the Mint.

But there were some exceptions. There were some experimental coins in 1896 that came out, pennies and nickels that are very interesting and collectible. I don’t know how they made it out. If I had to guess, I’d say there might be a couple hundred of those 1896 coins when you consider all the varieties.

Another group of patterns was created in 1916, when the Mercury dime, Standing Liberty quarter, and Walking Liberty half dollar were designed. There were some patterns for those and between one and five of each of those got out. Again, probably not out the back door but more likely as a part of the designers’ collection, or something like that. A lot of them tend to be circulated, so they were probably carried as pocket pieces. Probably by people who knew what they had, but the coins found their way into circulation at some point.

After that, there’s basically not much that’s available. If you look through the Judd book, you’ll see a few experimental pieces in 1942. Everyone knows about the 1943 steel pennies that circulated in the United States. There was a shortage of copper during the war, and they had to come up with some other metal to strike coins with, so they ended up with a steel zinc cent that circulated.

Famous Wright quarter trial with 87 stars on the reverse. Photo courtesy of the National Numismatic Collection of the Smithsonian Institution via uspatterns.com.

The 1943 copper cent is a famous rarity. That’s the one you see people advertising in the back of comic books, looking to pay $10,000 to $50,000 for. I’ve been reading those ads for the last 40 years, but the 1943 copper cents are errors, not patterns. A few copper planchets somehow made it into the Mint in 1943 and got struck instead of steel. Those errors are worth a hundred to $300,000 today.

In 1942, before they came out with the steel cent, they considered all kinds of different compositions. They considered plastic, tempered glass, aluminum—there was a whole series of experimental patterns struck in 1942 before they came out with those 1943 steel pennies. So that’s another group of coins that’s available.

Those coins, by the way, exist in two different ways. There are coins struck from the regular Lincoln cent dies. Those were all struck at the Mint. There were also these dummy dies. The reverse said “United States Mint,” and the obverse was taken from a Columbian one-centavo piece made in 1942. Those dies happened to be at the U.S. Mint, and the Mint did strike some experimental patterns from them, but they also made them available to outside manufacturers who were being considered as possible suppliers of the planchets for the new coinage in these alternative metals. Those pieces struck at the Mint are extremely rare. As for the privately manufactured pieces, hundreds exist in plastic, but those in other compositions are all extremely rare.

Collectors Weekly: What happens to patterns that don’t get used in circulation?

Lustig: They go the Smithsonian, they go to a collector or they get destroyed. Nowadays almost anything that’s made at the Mint is destroyed, with only a few exceptions. They’re not available to collectors, but occasional things still slip out. In 1999, in anticipation of the Sacagawea dollar coin that went into circulation in 2000, they were considering various alternative compositions of golden-type alloys that might be used, and there are some experimental pieces that came out of the Mint from that period. Again, all of those are extremely rare yet surprisingly affordable. You can buy a 1999 Washington quarter struck on one of these experimental alloys for less than $5,000, even though there are very few of them.

Collectors Weekly: What are some of the major trends you’ve noticed in coin collecting?

Lustig: I would tell you two things: First, there are coin collectors and there are coin investors, and then there are all the people somewhere in between. Coin investing has been in somewhat of a decline since the late 1980s, but coin collecting has been slowly but steadily advancing, so the people who are buying right now have much purer collector mentality about it than they did when I started in the mid-1970s and the 1980s. In my way of thinking, that’s a good thing.

The other thing I’d say is that since I’ve been in the hobby—or the business, depending on how you measure it—the average age of the collector has increased significantly. There aren’t as many kids entering the hobby in the last couple of decades, which is primarily a function of it being so difficult to find interesting coins.

Forty to 50 years ago, kids could go into the bank, buy a bag of pennies and search through it to find things to fill their albums, scarce things and things that were more valuable than the face value. You could find silver coins in circulation at the banks, but today it’s impossible for kids to do that, so the hobby isn’t as interesting to them. As a result, I’d say over the last 40 years, the average age of a collector has probably increased 25 to 30 years. It’s a big shift, and it means that the average collector today is far more sophisticated than he was 25 or 30 years ago.

This copper trial piece is the first dollar struck by the US Mint. Photo courtesy of Ira & Larry Goldberg's Coins & Collectibles via uspatterns.com.

It’s exciting, but we still have to wonder where we’re going to be in 20 or 30 years when these guys start dying off. I hope that we do a good job and bring more people into the hobby. There’s lots of good work being done in that direction, and we’re far from doomed, but the market could be a smaller place in 30 years.

As far as patterns go, it generally takes a sophisticated collector to seek out and appreciate a pattern, so the increasing sophistication of the coin market has been good for the pattern market. With the Internet and all the books out there and the reach of the auctions, I don’t see that changing.

In the old days, it used to be difficult for a collector to participate in more than a few auctions a year, and often they were bidding based on pictures or even just written descriptions. Today, on the Internet, you can get incredibly good pictures of anything being sold anywhere in the world. You can participate in half a dozen auctions a week, and that doesn’t even include things on eBay. The opportunities to buy coins have increased dramatically. It’s much more feasible for a collector to enter a market like patterns today than it was 30 years ago because the coins are available. Now you can be everywhere. The Internet makes it viable to collect things that previously were very difficult to find.

Collectors Weekly: Are there overall categories that people usually collect in?

Lustig: There’s a collector for everything. Some things are more popular than others. There might be a million people in the country working on sets of Lincoln pennies but there might only be a hundred working on specific sets of patterns. That number’s probably realistic. The pattern market is much bigger than that because there are a lot of collectors who will just occasionally buy this or that, but there are relatively very few pattern collectors who are actually working on a specific set of something where they know exactly which coins they need.

There are about 2,000 different patterns, and you could spend a lifetime of money just buying one of this and one of that without really setting any boundaries. But it’s very rare for someone to get serious and say, “I want to put together a collection of the pattern nickels from 1883.” There might only be a hundred people that are serious about working within boundaries like that, and those collectors might only have the opportunity to buy one coin every two or three years because the specific coins they need don’t necessarily come to market as readily as they’d like them to. If there are only two in existence, you have to wait for one to become available. Most people don’t have that discipline.

Collectors Weekly: Is completing a set the collector’s goal?

Lustig: It depends on the collector. If someone’s collecting Buffalo nickels, for example, the logical way to put together a set of Buffalo nickels is to fill the album, so yes, you’re looking to complete the set. There are very few people who actually take on Buffalo nickels with the idea of just buying an occasional Buffalo nickel that turns them on. It’s so easy and it’s so well-defined and achievable that doing it any other way almost doesn’t make any sense. But when it comes to something like patterns, it’s almost just the opposite. It’s so difficult to complete a set of anything that most people choose to just buy an occasional piece that turns them on.

There is one other way to collect patterns and that is to buy the patterns that complement a series of regular coins. For example, a Buffalo nickel collector might want to buy one or two Buffalo nickel patterns to go with his collection. It would greatly improve the collection and he’d have things that no one else had, and that’s exciting. Then he knows exactly what he needs, but he’s not really a pattern collector. He just wants things to go with his Buffalo nickel set.

An example of the 1796 no stars quarter eagle struck in white metal from rusted dies. This is a restrike believed to have been made by Joseph Mickley or Montroville Dickeson from dies the mint sold as scrap. Photo courtesy of Heritage via uspatterns.com.

There are multiple ways of collecting patterns. The first way is to define a set and try to complete it. You have to define the set yourself, and that can be more challenging than it might sound. You’d actually have to go through a Judd book and figure out what exists. As I said before, one could collect all of the pattern Liberty Head nickels from 1883. Another good challenge would be to collect all of the Morgan dollar patterns of 1878. In my opinion, taking on a well-defined project like that is the best way to begin collecting patterns.

The second way of collecting patterns would be to just buy an occasional pattern that turns you on. It could be anything, or nothing in particular. Then the third way is to buy patterns that complement your collection of regular U.S. coins. So if you’re collecting Morgan dollars, you might want a Morgan dollar pattern or two. You wouldn’t necessarily have to have them all.

Collectors Weekly: What is the general state of the coin market?

At this point in time, nothing is hot. There are many areas of the market that are actively collected, but none of them are fad-like in popularity and none of them are increasing rapidly in value.

Truth told, there aren’t that many people coming into the market right now. At this point in the economic cycle, all the hardcore collectors are still collecting what they were collecting as much as they possibly can. The investors, for the most part, are on the sidelines, if not liquidating.

If you had asked me the same question 10 years ago, I would have told you the hottest area of the market is the state quarters. We had 50 states issuing coins, and everyone was buying albums and filling them up with coins out of circulation. There were people buying proof sets and silver proof sets of state quarters. It was a fad, but that’s over, and there’s really nothing to replace it at this point in time. It’s probably a good thing. The U.S. Mint tried doing the same thing again with these presidential one-dollar coins, but they don’t circulate so no one pays any attention and that set never materialized.

Collectors Weekly: How important is a pattern to a non-pattern collector?

Lustig: In general, people who don’t collect patterns get excited when they see one. They generally don’t think of themselves as being potential owners of the coins, but they get excited. Occasionally someone does jump over and become an avid collector. A lot of people have only read about pattern coins or seen pictures on the Internet, but at the average major coin show, you’ll find a hundred patterns on the floor.

Collectors Weekly: What can you tell us about the famous Liberty nickel?

One of only 2 pattern half cents. It was struck from the regular dies in two different copper-nickel alloys either 88% copper and 12% nickel or 90% copper and 10% nickel. Photo courtesy of American Numismatic Rarities via uspatterns.com.

Lustig: You’re talking about the 1913 Liberty nickel, which isn’t a pattern. They struck Liberty nickels for circulation between 1883 and 1912, and in 1913, a Mint insider struck off five pieces for his own benefit, which subsequently became very expensive coins. Each one is a multimillion-dollar coin. It’s interesting that you mentioned that coin because on the other side of the series, they also made a Liberty nickel in 1882 of the exact same design, and there are probably 75 of those in existence.

The 1882 Liberty nickel is a very popular coin, even with non-pattern collectors. There are only 75 people who have them, but again, some people buy them to go with their collection of Liberty nickels, some people buy them for their collection of patterns, and other people buy them just because it’s a cool coin. It’s one of the coins that we call a transitional pattern, and that just means that it’s the design that was adopted for circulation in the previous year. There are 2,000 different patterns in existence and maybe 20 transitional patterns, so they’re popular for that reason.

Collectors Weekly: Was the Mint looking for something specific with the patterns or was it just whichever was the most visually pleasing?

Lustig: In some cases, yes, they are looking for something in particular, and in other cases, the designers just decided to design something new to see if they could improve what was in existence. Sometimes no one even asked them to do the work. They just had some time on their hands and they came up with a new design. They know what the composition is supposed to be, they know what the size is supposed to be, they know what the denomination is going to be, and then they just run with it.

Collectors Weekly: What are private patterns from non-Mint dies?

Lustig: Those coins came about when someone not associated with the Mint had an idea. For example, in 1849, a coin designer named Bouvet was looking for a job at the U.S. Mint, so he designed a 10-dollar gold piece. He made the dies and sent an example of his work so they could see his capabilities. Now, that’s an example of a pattern from non-Mint dies—it was made for a semi-legitimate purpose. By the way, the coin was ugly and he didn’t get the job.

There are other situations where someone might make a pattern and try to make his own dies and market it on TV as a novelty item. That’s a coin that I would say has no legitimate purpose, but it also fits the category of a pattern from non-Mint dies. When you collect patterns, it’s really important to understand why the piece was made. Was it made for a legitimate experiment? Was it made as an artistic exercise by the designer? Was it made to solve a problem? Was it made to sell to a collector? Was it made to sell something on TV?

Once you understand why the coin was made, you’re in a much better position to decide if it’s something you want to put your money into. Personally, I find it much more interesting to own patterns that were made at the Mint for the purpose of solving a problem—legitimate experimental pieces, legitimate works of innovation. I find it less interesting to buy things that were made for collectors.

For example, they might take the obverse of one coin to the reverse of another design, so you might have a three-dollar gold piece on one side and a nickel on the other. There was no reason to make that coin other than to sell it to a collector for a few bucks in the 1860s or 1870s, so to me, that’s not interesting. It’s a novelty item, but not the type of thing I’d want to spend $60,000 on. Every collector has to make his own judgments, but my advice would be to understand exactly why a coin was made.

Collectors Weekly: What are some of your favorite stories behind the coins that you have?

First gold dollar pattern. Photo courtesy of Bowers and Merena via uspatterns.com.

Lustig: In 1814, the United States Mint struck a half dollar. They took the regular dies of a half dollar and made a coin in platinum. The half dollars for circulation at the time were silver. The United States Mint had never used platinum before for circulation. There’s no record of the U.S. Mint even considering using platinum for circulating coins, yet these coins are known to have been struck in 1814, and you know that because there are silver half dollars made from the same dies.

So why were they made? No one knows, but I have a theory. To me, it’s a theory that makes the coins interesting. My feeling is that those pieces are experimental in nature and they were made in preparation for a 10-dollar platinum coin. Again, the theory is that there were no 10-dollar pieces made in the United States in 1814, so there were no dies lying around from which platinum and gold pieces could have been struck.

When you have an 1814 platinum half dollar in your hand, it’s shockingly heavy because you’re looking at this coin struck from half-dollar dies, and as a collector you know what a half dollar feels like in your hand. It’s twice as heavy or so. It’s a mind-blowing thing for a collector.

Collectors Weekly: Are there any major coin collecting clubs?

Lustig: There are thousands of coin clubs. A good place to start looking for specialized coin clubs is the American Numismatic Association’s website, which is Money.org. They have lists of all their member clubs on their website. Beyond that, you can Google your way to a thousand different coin clubs online. There are also local clubs that actually have meetings. The major clubs have conventions, and there are all kinds of meetings that take place at those shows for specialized groups. Whatever you want, it’s out there.

Collectors Weekly: What advice would you give to somebody who is entering the world of coin collecting?

Lustig: I’ll give you two pieces of advice: First, you probably won’t keep most of the coins you buy early in your collecting life. You’ll want to sell them. You’re going to make mistakes. You’ll decide to collect something else. So it’s best to spend relatively little money early on to learn what you want to collect. Then you can start spending the real money.

Second, before you decide to collect a series, do the math, by which I mean you should know what it’s going to cost you to complete the project. I’d say four out of five collectors who decide to build various sets realize sometime in the middle of the project that they they can’t afford to do it and that’s simply because they never did the math. Take on a project that you can afford to do right. The hobby is much more fun when you can actually accomplish what you set out to do.

Collectors Weekly: Thank you so much Andy for talking to us.

(All images in this article courtesy of USPatterns.com)

By Maribeth Keane and Jessica Lewis, Collectors Weekly Staff (Copyright 2009)

Harry Berzack is a collector of 19th-century and pre-World War II sewing machines. Unlike many collectors in this field, Harry’s 500-piece collection is international in scope. Recently we spoke with Harry about his collection of antique sewing machines, the history of sewing machines, their uses, and the four major manufacturers. We also discussed toy sewing machines made for children.

I work for a sewing machine distribution company that was started by my late father. We mainly distribute industrial sewing machines. At a very early age, I became interested in sewing machines in a general sense, and I started collecting old machines mainly to see the technology and how it had developed. Then I immigrated to the States—I’m originally from South Africa—and my new life caused about a 20-year hiatus in which I did very little with sewing machines, although the passion never left. Then about eight years ago, I started to have a little more time and I started to get back into it. Now it’s grown to the point where today I have one of the largest and best collections in the States.

We have a museum at our business where I house my collection. We’ve taken a section of our premises here to create a full museum environment where the machines are on display.

I have almost 500 sewing machines in my collection. Initially I brought some machines with me from South Africa, and I picked up one or two here and there over the next few years, but most of the machines—probably 450-plus of them—have been acquired over the last eight years.

Collectors Weekly: Do you have sewing machines from all over the world?

Berzack: Yes. That makes my collection a little different from most. Probably the best collection in the States is owned by a person named Carter Bays. Carter only collects American machines, and he has authored the standard book on antique American sewing machines. On the other hand, I have machines from America, Canada, England, France, Germany, Sweden, and Denmark, so my collection is more a worldwide but it also shows cross-influences.

I decided to collect from across the world intentionally. I just had a wide interest. There’s a great museum in England, but most of the machines there are British. The German museums are a little more mixed. There are probably 10 very good museum collections around the world.

I’m more drawn to the ideas in the machines than the country that made them. I’m drawn to rarity. I’m drawn to condition. I’m drawn to mechanical design and how people thought up different features. Some machines survive to this day and some were inherently no good to start with. It’s a passion of mine to see the way people thought, going back to the 1800s, and the sort of engineering they devised. They didn’t have the machine tools we have today, and yet they did some incredible work.

The earliest machines probably come from the 1840s and they’re very rare. Then you get into the 1850s, and the big names were Singer, Wheeler & Wilson, Grover & Baker, Howe—just a myriad. There were literally hundreds of people who made machines in different countries. Very few of the manufacturers have survived, and that in itself is part of the story. The small companies were gobbled up by Singer and others.

Of course, Singer is still around today and the name is still known. The Jones Company was bought by Brother, and I don’t think they use the Jones name anymore.

It was evolution. It was competition. It’s the old story: Someone’s making sewing machines and other people think they’re making a lot of money, so they say, “Why shouldn’t I?” At that time it was a comparatively easy industry to get into. Sometimes the ideas they had were not that good. Other times they ran into patent infringement problems and they were put out of business. Strangely enough, this was happening all over the world.

In America, there was a demand for household machines and a demand for commercial machines. The same sort of thing happened in Britain. With American machines, you had machines for home use, mainly with treadles because homes were bigger. In Europe, people didn’t have as much room, so most of the machines were hand cranks, which made them more portable. A sewing machine typically has a wheel on the side that’s used to position the needle and operate the machine. A hand crank is a handle that is attached to that wheel. Of course, in the commercial arena, it was all treadle and, later on, line shaft.

Collectors Weekly: So the hand cranks were used when there wasn’t as much space?

Berzack: It’s certainly difficult to make a general rule. Some people just didn’t want a treadle cluttering up the room. They wanted something they could push in a corner or put in the bottom of a cupboard and take out when they needed it. Other people by necessity didn’t have the room to put in a treadle or a cabinet.

To a lot of people, the sewing machine became a status symbol, so a lot of the cabinets are extremely ornate. Today, it’s very often that the more ornate the cabinet, the better the condition of the machine because they were show pieces. They weren’t used. A machine that was really used a lot may sell for $5, and then at the top of the market, you’d have the same machine encrusted with mother of pearl. By and large, those machines are in great condition today because no one wants to use them.

For a while, a sewing machine in the home was a status symbol. A husband would decide that his wife needed a machine, so he’d go out and buy a lovely machine. The sewing machines combined great design with pure utility.

In America, the four majors were Singer, Howe, Wheeler & Wilson, and Grover & Baker. They basically held all the patents, and they were always suing their competitors for patent infringement. They formed a consortium and pooled all their patents and a royalty was paid to this consortium for every machine made, including by themselves. They had some formula where they divvied up the proceeds each year. They had no hesitation in closing down other companies on patent infringement, so a lot of people sought to do things a different way to overcome the patents. For example, there were machines where the needle, instead of coming from the top down, was linked to the bottom and came up through the plate of the machine like an upside-down machine.

Collectors Weekly: What were some of the earliest designs that were being manufactured?

Berzack: It evolved very early into the form you have today—a base, an arm, the top coming across to hold the needle, and a drive from the underneath with either a bobbin or a shuttle. Those were all pretty early. There were circular-shaped machines, open latticework machines—it’s difficult to explain without having pictures or really working with it.

There are a number of pretty good books, but unfortunately most of them are out of print. There are current books, like Carter Bays’ book or Charles Law’s, that are still in print. Last year, Carter Bays came out with a third edition. A lot of the early books are out of print, but they do come up on eBay.

Then there’s another whole subset, and that’s toy sewing machines. As the mother used to sew, the daughter used to have a little toy machine to make garments for her dolls. Those machines are mainly German by two big companies and a number of smaller companies. There were some British companies like Vulcan, too. It’s a completely different interest, although I’ve got a small toy collection. It’s more the premium toys, though, because those are the more interesting ones to me. I have one toy machine from France from around 1867. I think that’s my earliest toy machine.

The real way for anyone to really get into this is to look at some of the collections. There’s the International Sewing Machine Collectors’ Society, which is ISMACS. Anyone in America who has any real interest in sewing machines should come to the convention in Charlotte, North Carolina.

My collection will be part of the convention’s itinerary. Anyone who comes through my place will get a guided tour. We’re expecting a couple of hundred people and they’ll be able to see machines that they otherwise would never see. For example, there’s an American machine called the Manhattan, and there are only two known Manhattans that have survived. I have one, and Carter Bays has the other. It was made by a New York company that called themselves Manhattan Sewing Machine Company. They made very few machines, probably less than 2,000, and then they disappeared.

Collectors Weekly: What are some of the other known rare machines?

Berzack: There are a number of machines in Carter Bays’ collection that are the only known examples, but you always have to be careful saying that because you never know when another one’s going to come up. For example, I had a machine that was the only known example and now there are three. I have two and Carter has one. So there are machines out there and eventually you’re going to find them. Everyone wants the rare machine. Two weeks ago, I drove 2,300 miles because I found a machine just outside Kansas City and the only other known example of that machine is in the Smithsonian. So now I’ve got the second known one, but until this one appeared, no one knew that it even existed.

To anyone who’s getting serious in toy machines, a good introduction would be the two volumes put out by Glenda Thomas. For American machines there’s Carter Bays’ book, The Encyclopedia of Early American Sewing Machines. It has illustrations and a bit of background on the companies: what they made, who they were, and when they were in business. Then, if you get more interested, you should join ISMACS. They publish a magazine that comes out every three months or so.

They’re the biggest sewing machine club by far. There are two others. There’s a website that’s based in England with a good gallery of machines but it’s more for quilters, and there’s a good website called Dincum.com. He’s a very good friend of mine.

Collectors Weekly: Do you collect modern machines or do you stop at a specific time period?

Berzack: The latest machines I have are from the 1940s. One of them is from the Second World War. Singer came out with a surgical sewing machine used in the field to stitch wounds. There aren’t many of them around, so that’s worthwhile. Another machine I have from the ’40s is still in its original packing case with the label on it where it was railed to a customer in Munster, Indiana. But I would say that probably 90 percent of my machines predate 1900.

Collectors Weekly: Were sewing machines first used in the home?

Berzack: Actually, no. There’s no one inventor of the machine. Different people had different ideas. There was a Frenchman whose first machines went into a factory in Paris—the workers were so upset because they thought that they were going to lose jobs. So the earliest machines were really designed for factories, but it very soon became a household thing.

A lot of the companies didn’t necessarily market under their own name. The department stores had departments selling sewing machines. Sears Roebuck had machines with decals with their name on it. Those machines could’ve been made by one of three or four different factories, and if you’re really into it, you can work out, “Well, this sewing machine was made for Montgomery Ward and this was made for Macy’s.” There are giveaways as to who the actual maker was but there are thousands of names out there.

Collectors Weekly: How did Singer become so well-known?

Berzack: Because of marketing, not invention. They were not great innovators, but they were unbelievable marketers. They bought people out. If you’re making a million machines a year and you have a factory in the States and a factory in England and you control your own distribution, you get into a very strong position and it’s not easy for people to fight you or dislodge you.

A lot of people copied them. The classic Singer machine in the early days, the mass-market machine, was the Singer Model 12, and there were literally hundreds of people who knocked it off in one way or another. There was a tremendous amount of copying. There was some licensing, but most of it was illegal copying. In fact, there were even people who copied the Singer emblem, the “S” emblem. People tried to jump on the bandwagon.

Singer owned its own companies all over the world. They have never badged a machine, which is putting someone else’s name on, and they control their own distribution. They have their own subsidiary companies and factories in probably 20 to 30 countries, like Italy, Brazil, Scotland, Australia, South Africa, Taiwan. They had a big presence in Russia, too, prior to the revolution.You can take out an atlas and wherever your finger falls, Singer probably had a factory there.

Collectors Weekly: How did the machine evolve from the 1800s to the 1900s?

Berzack: The early machines tried to replicate the movement of a hand pulling a needle all the way through a piece of fabric and then pushing it back the other side, like you would hand stitch today. Then came the advent of the chain stitch machine and everything depended on the needle forming a loop and either catching the loop or having a shuttle go between the needle and the outer thread through the loop to capture the thread. Then the needle comes up and goes through the top of the fabric again. That became the basis of sewing. It became a matter of, “How does that loop get formed?”

The next thing was, as I said, the shuttle moving through the loop. You had what was called a round bobbin, which is basically the way lock stitches form today. The earliest bobbins were Wheeler & Wilson and that goes back to the 1860s. Today you don’t have shuttles at all because everything is either bobbin or loop or chain-stitch machines.

Collectors Weekly: How many different parts are there to a sewing machine?

Berzack: That’s like asking how long is a road. There are some very simple machines that aren’t very effective and don’t have many parts. A modern industrial sewing machine could have 1,500 to 2,000 parts in it, but you could also find a machine with 20 parts. They’re not very effective, but they exist.

In the early machines, which were invariably made out of cast iron, one turn of the handle gave you one stitch. One of the first innovations was to gear it so that one turn of the handle gave you two stitches so you’d get double the production. Today you have diecast, aluminum, and plastic machines that are capable of doing 9,000 stitches a minute.

Collectors Weekly: Are repair parts still available for older machines?

Berzack: No. People who are really into it have to know a little engineering and make their own parts. If you use an antique machine, then you’re basically using one of the mass-produced machines and their parts are easier to find. Singer made a million machines a year of the class 12, so they probably made about 10 million machines total and there could well be half a million of them that are still running. It’s comparatively easy to pick up an old machine for parts to adapt or modify. But the very old stuff? If you’re missing something, that’s it.

Collectors Weekly: When you collect sewing machines, are there specific things you look for?

Berzack: I look for rarity, condition, technical differences, and what would have been an innovation at the time. I try to fill holes in my collection with rarer machines. There are rare machines that come up every now and again on eBay. Sometimes I get them and sometimes someone’s more generous than I am. It’s very difficult today to find machines in antique shops or flea markets. Odd ones still pitch up but not as much as they used to.

A lot of the antique shops have no idea how to value these things. Say there was a Singer that was patented in 1860. Because it’s old, it would be marked at, say, 300 bucks, but the value of it is probably closer to $25 because Singer made half a million of them that year so they’re not rare. They assume that because it’s old, it must be valuable.

Every sewing machine collector I know has a machine that they overpaid for and a machine that they’re sorry they sold. As soon as you go beyond the basic machines from the 1900s, what are called the quilters’ machines, you have to start educating yourself or you’re going to hit the poor house before you know where it is, and you’ll have nothing to show for it. Anyone who doesn’t come to the shows is going to miss a great opportunity to educate themselves.

Collectors Weekly: Is it possible to find the actual patents?

Berzack: There’s a lot of patent information out there. Some people collect a lot of the paperwork. You can’t collect everything, though. Some sewing machine collectors also collect oil bottles. Some collect old needles. I’ve got a pretty good collection of oil bottles. I probably have around 150.

Collectors Weekly: Thank you Harry for taking the time to talk with us about antique sewing machines.

(All images in this article courtesy Harry Berzack)

By Jessica Lewis, Collectors Weekly Staff (Copyright 2009)

Frazier Dailey talks about antique and vintage tractors, discussing their history, the major manufacturers, collecting trends, and events for tractor enthusiasts. He can be contacted via his website, Antique Tractors Forum.

I started collecting antique tractors in 1971. I’ve owned several old tractors over the years and always wound up selling them to somebody else—all but this one old 1938 Case. That old Case will never be sold. I drove that same tractor when I was five years old, sitting on my daddy’s lap, and it’s just not going to be sold.

Its name is Samson, and I bought it in 1966. I was farming at the time, so I used it to plow corn, rake hay, feed cattle, that kind of stuff. I’m called the Case man because of that old Case.

My local grocery store does displays in the produce section, so I asked them if they’d like to have a tractor to put in there, and they said sure. Before I drove it in, I measured the doors. I only had a half inch on either side, but I’ve driven that tractor so much, I can almost shut my eyes and do it. I drove it right in, parked it, and it sat in there for about two weeks. It drew a lot of attention. People just came in and stood and looked.

The store called me back and said they want to do it again, so as soon as I’m done with some shows, I’m going to bring it back.

About his collection:

1938 R Case

My favorite tractors are Case. I think the round-nose Case was one of the prettiest tractors, and the 40s series tractors that they made were awfully pretty, too.

Right now, I’ve got two big tractors and two small ones. I have this 1938 Case, 1969 and 1970 Case garden tractors, and a 1946 Massey-Harris that I bought last year. I bought it to resell but I liked it so much I kept it.

I have a shed that I keep the old Case in, and right now I’m working on the Massey-Harris, so it’s sitting out in my back yard with a parade wagon that I’m also working on. I use the parade wagon for parades and hay rides. When I do the fun runs, there’s always someone wanting a ride, so it works for that, too. My wife likes to ride with me, so she rides in there and people ride with her. It’s a lot of fun. It’s a family thing.

I’ve also got a vintage hay bailer that probably came out in the early 1950s. It’s just like the first hay bailer my dad had, and that’s why I wanted it. The only thing I need to do is just clean it up and paint it. I’ll get that done either this year or next because I want to start showing it behind my tractor.

On the history of tractors:

Tractors started right before the turn of the 20th century, but they never really made a big impact until the 1930s. Most of the big companies started making war products. Some made tractors for the wars—Case did, John Deere did—and some of them even made bullets and bombs and all that, so it was hard for a farmer to buy a tractor back then. There were no new tractors being made, so there was a shortage. Then they got back up on their feet and people started replacing their horses with tractors. One company would buy out another company and merge with yet another.

When they first started making tractors, they had steam engines. People still collect steam engines today. Steam engines went on prairie tractors, enormous tractors. When they made those big old tractors, only the richest people could own them.

In the 1900s, most tractors ran on kerosene. Then, in the middle of the 1950s, they started on diesel instead of kerosene. Diesel tractors were a lot cheaper to operate than gas at the time. They lasted longer. They were more expensive to overhaul, but in the long run they were just cheaper for the farmer to use.

In the 1930s, tractors were what are now called “unstyled tractors.” They were just made for use and that was it. A lot of them were painted the same color, just all grey. Then Farmall went to red, and in 1938, Case styled their tractors and painted them Flambeau red, which is a reddish orange color named after the Flambeau River. Bright reds became popular because in those days people were driving the tractors on the road and they wanted a color that could be seen easily.

They put sheet metal on the hoods, and a lot of companies put skirts on the motors to hide them. All the manufacturers tried to really dress their tractors up and make them look good because they realized a farmer was just like a guy behind the wheel of a car—he wanted the pretty one.

On restoring vintage tractors:

L case with GM diesel Conversion 371

Most people restore their tractors themselves, but there are also collectors who hire people to restore them. Sometimes it may take five or six years to restore a tractor. As a matter of fact, we’ve been working on a 1941 Case for four years now and I just finished getting the last of the parts for it the other day, so hopefully we can finish it and start showing it this year.

Parts are hard to find for some tractors. Sometimes you have to hold out until you find the part, and sometimes you have to actually make the parts because they just don’t exist. Some companies don’t make reproduction parts, so if you can’t make it yourself you have to find somebody else to make it. It could be a steering part or a motor part. Sometimes you have to make your gaskets. Manifolds are also hard to find for certain tractors. You may have to find somebody who’s got the part you need and see if they’ll let you borrow it so you can copy it yourself or have it made.

Generally you can find motor parts, but sometimes sheet metal is hard to come by. The sheet metal on the fenders of orchard tractors is awfully hard to come by. I’ve made some sheet metal parts, side panels and stuff like that.

Right now I’m hunting—and have been hunting for a long time—for headlight brackets for a Massey-Harris 20. I can’t find them anywhere. I have one but I need three. Some stuff is cast, like these brackets, so there’s no way I can make it unless I take one and have it cast, but I’m not going to do that yet because it’ll cost a fortune. We’re also looking for a hood for an Oliver. Now that’s hard to find. We’ve been having trouble, but eventually it’ll show up somewhere.

I go on the internet and search for people listing junkyards or selling cars. I’ll also advertise what I’m looking for on my website. Some people put up the stuff they got for sale on my website. There are some companies that make reproduction parts for these old tractors—sometimes you have to settle for a reproduction part if you can’t find the original.

Nowadays with the internet, what you’re looking for is much easier to find. I’ve been hunting for three parts for a while now and I found one on the internet. Every day or two, I’ll email somebody asking for parts. Before, you just didn’t have the contacts. You didn’t know who to call or what to do, so that’s made the hobby a lot easier.

The only trouble we’ve had was when we got a Case VAC-14 for my grandson. We found it at a barn, and we had to take the barn down around it. We spent all day taking the barn down and then trying to pull the tractor out and get it loaded so we could get it home. There was a book, Tractor in a Haystack, and the first chapter mentions that tractor.

It was a pretty hard deal but it’s been worth it. It was his first tractor. It’s still his; he’s never going to get rid of it. It’s just one of those things.

On the importance of serial numbers:

The serial number on a tractor is very important. You need a matching serial number on the motor and on the tractor so that you know that the motor is the original motor. Some people won’t restore them unless they’re original with the matching serial numbers for the engine and the tractor.

To restore a tractor right, you need the original serial number plate it came with. As a matter of fact, some people take off their plates and put ’em somewhere safe where nobody can steal ’em because people will put them on other tractors. It’s been known to happen. You can buy reproduction serial number plates now, too, but it’s best to have the original still on there.

On farming with an antique tractor:

Some people still use the old tractors, especially small-time farmers or the guys that only have a few acres. The new tractors are so expensive, it saves you a lot of money. A new tractor is 30- or 40-thousand dollars, but you can buy an old tractor for anywhere from $1,200 to $3,500. It may not be the best looking tractor but it’ll do what you want to do, no problem. If you want to get a real good antique tractor with everything on it, you can go from about $5,000 to $6,000.

Most collectors’ tractors run. I’ve read stories where they will start so many this year and so many next year and just keep them in rotation, but the small guy, he’s starting his every day.

About tractor collectors:

Vintage Case Tractor Ad

A lot of different people collect. There are doctors, lawyers, common people, old farmers. Young people are getting into it now. Some collectors may have hundreds of tractors, some may have one or two, and some might not have any—maybe they’re waiting on a tractor that’s going to be handed down from the family but they’re still interested in collecting tractors. Most collectors that I know have between one and 10 tractors.

Most of your collectors are not farmers. They usually have a factory job. They need a daytime job because it gets expensive to collect. Sometimes you can buy a tractor that’s already been restored for cheaper than what you’d pay to buy one and restore it yourself. Sometimes you can find someone wanting to sell one and you’re better off buying it that way and maybe just doing some cosmetic stuff on it.

There are female collectors, too. You see almost as many women at shows as you do men. A lot of them have a tractor they show and ride along with their husband, and a lot have their own.

I have five kids. Two of them are into it big time, and another has a tractor that she brings to the local show here. My sister lives in Texas and she comes in to bring her tractor to the show. She’s got a trailer that she loads it on behind her motor home. Some of my nephews are into it and they show now. I’ve got cousins that show. So yeah, there are a lot of people in my family that are into it. That’s pretty common. A lot of the families all get into it big time together.

A lot of our tractors nowadays are being taken to other countries. Foreign collectors come over here and buy them and then put them in those big pods and ship them. I know a guy in England who just bought a tractor from Kansas. You can ship them all over the world.

There are U.S, collectors that buy foreign tractors and bring them back here, too. It works both ways. The Cockshutt is a big one that people here collect; it was made in Canada. They made the same tractor for the U.S. but it had a different name. It’s weird.

On types of models to collect:

Rowcrop tractors have two small wheels that sit close together in the front, and that’s so that you can drive those two small wheels down the center of a row and your big back wheels will be in the center of a different row. A standard model would have a fixed front width between the wheels that you couldn’t adjust. You could get a wider front end that was adjustable so you could set it for one row, two rows, et cetera. They also made tractors with just one wheel in the front.

Vintage Case tractor

Highcrop tractors are real high off the ground so they can spray the crops. A highcrop tractor is really a sought-after collector’s item. They also had rice tractors that were used in the south and they are also collectible. Companies wouldn’t make more than just a few of them.

There isn’t really one type that’s more collectible than another. You’ve got people that collect John Deere, you’ve got people that collect Farmall, you’ve got people that collect Case, you’ve got people that collect Massey-Harris, you’ve got people that collect Cockshutt, and some people don’t care about the makers and will collect any maker or model.

A lot of people do stick to a certain one and it’s usually the one they were raised up on or someone in their family had one. For me, no matter what, I’m partial to Case tractors. I’ll collect any kind, but I’m still partial to Case. I just can’t stay away from them. As for dates, older people will collect the tractors from before the 1950s and the younger people will collect up to the 1970s and ’80s because those are the tractors they grew up with.

The most interesting models to a collector would be the rare tractors, and when I say rare, I mean tractors that were made for only one or two years or tractors that were demonstrative or experimental. They’re worth a lot more money.

My Massey-Harris was only made for three years. It was their 100-year anniversary tractor, so that’s the reason I bought that. I look for unusual tractors.

On collecting tractor accessories:

1954 Vac-14 found under a fallen barn - belongs to Frazier's grandson, Kevin

Any old farm machinery is considered collectible. You can still buy the ploughs and people still use them. We have what we call plow days: you find yourself a used plow, fix it up, and put it behind your antique tractor and go plow. There’ll be up to 100 tractors in one field.

Combines started out as thrashers. You had to cut and bind the wheat or grain and then bring it to the thrasher because it was stationary. Then the combines came in and they were pulled by a tractor. Eventually the combines went self-propelled—they had their own motors so you didn’t need tractors to pull them anymore.

People don’t bring combines to tractor shows in my part of the country, but in other parts they do, especially the Midwest. A lot of people collect them. That’s a big collecting thing right now, all types of equipment—pull-type combines, pull-type corn pickers, et cetera. Every once in a while you’ll see somebody in this part of the country that shows them. You’ll still see thrashers at the shows every now and then. Somebody will bring wheat and they’ll thrash it, and they’ll have a stationary bailer just to show people how it works.

Collecting toy model tractors is a very big thing, too. I’ve got a son that restores model tractors for people. They have toy shows where you can buy the different models. Some collectors never take them out of the box. You can buy John Deere in just about any of the models. They’ve got all the older ones. Some kids nowadays are collecting models of old garden tractors.

On the key tractor manufacturers:

John Deere is the only original company that’s left. Now most of the tractors are made overseas and out of plastic. We often talk about these old timers, like my 1938 Case that I can still use. I’m wondering if the new ones will be around that long. It’s very interesting to see what will take place.

In this country, John Deere, Farmall, International Harvester, Massey-Harris, Oliver, Cockshutt, and Ford are probably your biggest manufacturers. There were all kinds of configurations of a tractor and different horsepowers. When they first started, they made one tractor, and a few years later they’d improve it and give it a different letter series.

On joining a tractor club or going to a show:

1951 John Deere B - belongs to Ron Komar of Elba, New York

There are all kinds of tractor clubs—big clubs, small clubs, local clubs, national clubs. Some will have shows and what we call fun runs, where people will meet up and ride. I do rides for Relay for Life. I don’t charge, I just put out a donation jar.

There are tractor plow days and tractor thrashing days all across the U.S. and in England, New Zealand, and Australia. I went to a tractor show in the middle of May. It was pretty good. It seems like the interest in tractor shows is still holding up well.

There are a certain number of people that camp out at shows, and almost everybody’s got a dog. Some people have more than one dog and they always come to tractor shows. It’s mostly just getting together, talking, cooking, and playing games. There are tractor games and all kinds of stuff to do.

The main difference between a tractor show and a car show is that at a car show, the guys are always polishing their cars and trying to keep people off them, whereas at a tractor show, they just wipe off the tractor and put it in line. Sometimes you may see them driving it, or they may be working on it and repairing something.

You’ll see a certain amount of the same people at the same shows in your area. There’s usually a group that follows one another and goes where the others go, but if you travel far away, 100 miles or so, you’ll see a lot of tractors and people that you never saw before.

I first showed my Case in 1971. Years later, I took my grandsons to their first show with the same Case. I drive my tractor when I do my own show in Santana. We drive them about six or seven miles. We hook some kind of machinery on behind them and drive them right down the main roads and highways. You don’t have to have a license plate or a driver’s license in Kentucky. My grandson drove my tractor 15 or 16 miles on the road some years ago when he was only 15 years old.

We don’t usually have any trouble on the roads. When we do these fun runs, we’ll travel 40 miles with our tractors. Last time we went from Lexington, Kentucky to Winchester, Kentucky, which is 43 miles roundtrip. We went to a museum there and had a cook-out. I think we had 15 tractors on that fun run, and we had to go through some pretty tough traffic.

About Case man’s Website:

My web site was two years old the first day of March 2009. In 2005, I found out I had throat cancer. I did all my treatments and I had my operation, and I decided I would start a forum for other tractor people. I had a lot of friends already through the antique tractor shows so I started this forum. Now I have friends from all over the world.

I got people from England who come to my shows and stay with me while they’re here—I never laid eyes on them before then. We’ve grown by leaps and bounds. We never make fun of nobody. We never make fun of people’s spelling. Different parts of the country talk differently and spell differently, but it all means the same thing.

Some advice for new collectors:

If I was just starting to collect antique tractors, I would find something that didn’t need a lot of work—something that was already running that I could just clean up and paint. That’s a good way to start, and then you can dig a little deeper. Your first tractor’s always going to have a special place in your heart, I don’t care if they made a million of them.

There are so many different tractor books: there’s a book on how to buy an antique tractor, a book on how to restore it, and another on how to paint it. And then there are books on certain manufacturers. I’ve got a book called 150 Years of J.I. Case that’s nothing but different Case models, when they were made, how to read serial numbers, stuff like that. It’s one of the best books that I have. It’s got everything.

(All images in this article courtesy Frazier Dailey of Antique Tractors Forum).

By Maribeth Keane, Collectors Weekly Staff (Copyright 2009)

Jeff Hess talks about the history, mechanics, and evolution of wristwatches, discussing some of the major manufacturers and designers. Jeff is an online moderator on the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors’ message board, and can be contacted via his website, Hess Fine Art.

I started with pocket watches as a child, watching old movies on television, watching the cowboys occasionally pull out an old pocket watch. I collected pocket watches until my grandfather gave me his old wristwatch when I was about 18. It was a real funny-looking, old thing, and I thought it was an interesting design, a little bit different. I wore it and was surprised at the amount of comments that I got from people. So that was my first bit of interest.

A Ball Watch Company wristwatch

I really got hit hard in my late 20s and early 30s with the beautiful designs of the Hamilton Electric. It’s a watch that was way ahead of its time in design. It had unusual shapes and color and just really outrageous designs.

About 20 years ago, there were a couple of guys in New York City that were writing a book about Hamilton Electric. I was already kind of an expert on Hamilton Electric, so they asked me for my help, and I told them that I was going to find out who designed those Hamilton Electrics because no one knew. I started calling former employees of Hamilton because in the late 1980s, there were a lot of former employees still living. One guy led to another who led to another, and finally one guy said, “Oh, yes, those were designed by old Richard Arbib.” And the name came forward – Richard Arbib.

I asked if he was still living, and they said, “Oh, I’m sure he’s long gone,” but not wanting to give up, I got back on the telephone. I started in Pennsylvania where Hamilton was, calling all around the towns, looking for Richard Arbib. I found nothing, and finally I thought I may be on the wrong track and should start with big cities. I called New York City information, and sure enough there was a Richard Arbib listed. I called him up and said, “Are you Richard Arbib that used to design for Hamilton?” and he said, “Yes, I am. I’m amazed that anybody even knows that.” I told him I wanted to interview him, and he said, “Come on up.”

So I went up to interview him in New York. He was in his late 70s or early 80s. He was wearing a bad toupee and his house was total clutter – a stack to the ceiling with drawings and memorabilia and original renderings from all the different companies that he had designed for. Being a watch nut, I asked him if I could actually purchase drawings, and he let me. I could have bought all of the engine drawings and the automobile drawings and the vacuum cleaner drawings, but I was too naïve to do that because I wasn’t really into the whole design world. I was into watches.

I bought all of the watch renderings that he had, and 20 years later his stuff is included in museums around the world. Had I known then, of course, I would have bought every single one that he had, but that really ramped up my collecting of anything that connected with Hamilton Electric, especially those unusual designs that were designed by Richard Arbib. So that’s the crux of my wristwatch collection right now – Hamilton Electric ephemera, renderings, drawings, and the Hamilton Electric watches themselves. They also made a pocket watch or two, but they’re quite rare.

I also collect Ball watches. Ball was located in Cleveland, Ohio. He took other people’s movements and completely manufactured them from scratch. I have an early wristwatch that he designed in 1918 that had radium on the dial to make it easy to see. It was a very unusual watch, one of the first wristwatches. Wristwatches didn’t start getting popular until the 1915, 1918 era during World War I.

Later on, his sons and grandsons had a store in Cleveland that had a myriad of watches that they designed. They were rather unusual, and most had Swiss movements. They were allowed on the railroads in 1959, before any other wristwatches. Railroad men always wanted wristwatches in the 1950s, but the powers said that the wristwatches were too small and they did not keep good enough time to be allowed as a true railroad watch. Finally Webb C. Ball’s family made the first watch to be of official railroad standard.

They had to prove that their watch could keep time within certain tolerances, and they had to lobby the railroads. They had to do a lot of politicking. It was a little easier at that point because the men didn’t want to carry around these big, old, heavy pocket watches anymore. I have a nice collection of railroad Ball watches as well as Ball dress watches, which are usually rectangular and round with unusual dials. They were predominant in the 1940s through the 1950s.

Collectors Weekly: When did Hamilton start? Were they always Hamilton Electric?

Hess: No. Hamiltons were just plain, old wristwatches. They have a fantastic reputation in the world of watches. Hamilton is sometimes referred to as the Patek Philippe of America. Patek Philippe is one of the finest watches in the world. Hamilton made terrific watches, wonderful manual-wind watches. In about 1953 or ’54, they decided to attempt to start manufacturing an electric watch.

Hamilton wanted to be the first, and it was the first, but it was not a good time keeper. For the most part, most Hamilton Electrics didn’t work very well, but it still sold well because of the incredible, unusual designs of Arbib.

Collectors Weekly: How did wristwatches start out?

A Hamilton Electric Wristwatch

Hess: The first wristwatches were just pocket watches or ladies’ pendant watches with wire lugs attached to it. The wire lugs were soldered onto the edge of the old ladies’ pocket watch.

Everyone talks about who invented the wristwatch. Cartier is often credited with the first wristwatch, the Tank Watch, and Girard Perregaux claims on their website that they were the first to do it.

What we do know is that a lot of World War I veterans went to France from America and noticed that the Frenchmen were wearing women’s pendant watches strapped to their wrist. Then the military started using wristwatches. In the 1930s, watches were made to go around the leg. These old leg watches have huge bands. Everybody always says, “Man, that guy has big wrists,” but he was wearing it on his leg.

I think the heyday for writstwatches would probably be the 1930s. It was really a huge craze in the late 1920s and early ‘30s – they were pretty unstoppable. There were a lot of wonderful Art Deco watches being made.

Hamilton made a lot of fantastic watches during that time. They embraced wristwatches. The Waltham Watch Company in America lagged behind because they weren’t such great believers in wristwatches, and ultimately they went out of business. The best watches were Hamilton for quality and Elgin was the most prolific. Of course, Rolex, Cartier, and Patek Philippe were making extraordinary wristwatches during that time period as well. Those were the five biggest players.

Collectors Weekly: Was manufacture of wristwatches primarily concentrated in specific regions?

Hess: In the U.S., it was all over the country. Elgin was located in Elgin, Illinois. Hamilton was located in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It was a countrywide craze – in fact, it was a real craze all over the world.

Probably one of the most prolific makers of wristwatches in the world was Blancpain. A woman named Betty Fiechter was the secretary of Blancpain Watch Company, and she took over and decided she was going to concentrate on making all ladies’ watch movements for export into America. She made them for just about all the big companies. Quite often on a great brand name like Omega, if you look inside, the movement will actually be signed Blancpain or Rayville, which was another one of the names of her company. They made millions of movements over the years, and eventually the company was bought by Omega.

I love that story so much that my wife and I traveled to Switzerland and went to the little town called Villeret where the factory was located. We found the original sign on the side of the original factory, and we bought it from the current owner and had it shipped back to America.

Collectors Weekly: How did companies like Hamilton and Elgin and Omega become the big names in American wristwatches?

Hess: Through advertising and good products. Elgin wasn’t spectacular like Hamilton, but it was a fine watch. It kept good time and they cranked them out. They made more than 30 million watches over the years – probably close to 60 million – and they were in existence for about a hundred years. Hamilton was not as prolific, but they made a much better watch. Hamilton’s pocket and wristwatches probably total less than 10 million.

What makes one watch finer than another watch is the movement. Hamilton made these fantastic movements that had raised gold jewel cups. They were often high-jeweled, with 19 and 21 jewels. Elgin made a lot of 15-jewel and 17-jewel watches as well. The more jewels you have in a watch, the more likely it is to not wear out.

A Patek Philippe Wristwatch

To purists, the movement means a lot. However, the movement doesn’t mean as much in wristwatches as it does pocket watches because wristwatches have traditionally been more about style than about the movement. But a real purist would like to have both a good movement and a good design.

What’s considered good design depends on what period you’re collecting. Early 1900 stuff was very clean. Generally they were very plain, round watches with just a little pocket watch movement. Later on, they got into the Art Deco stuff – long, rectangular watches of the 1930s. Collectors from the 1960s quite often like the more complicated watches. And if you’re strictly into timekeeping, you look for wristwatches that have a chronometer certificate or that were made for the railroad, like Ball.

The companies that strived for both design and the most accurate movement are the companies that remain strong today. Patek Philippe is a good point. Patek Philippe made watches that were extraordinarily good looking and kept extraordinarily good time.

Rolex took a different track. It made watches that kept excellent time but weren’t particularly good looking. But because they were waterproof and indestructible, they remain very strong today. So it depends. But with wristwatches, design was much more important than timekeeping ability, at least in the beginning.

I collect Hamiltons and railroad watches. There were other companies that later made railroad watches. Elgin made one. I primarily collect Ball railroad wristwatches. I also collect early Illinois watches because they’re few and far between also. Illinois made some unusual designs in the 1920s.

I also collect modern watches. I collect watches made in the 1990s and 2000s. I do this because I wear them. To this day, wristwatches are accessories. No one really needs a wristwatch. Everybody has a cell phone. For women, wristwatches have always been an accessory, but for men, a wristwatch is often the only fashion accessory they are allowed by society to wear. Earrings and necklaces and things like that are often frowned on in the workplace, but you can always change your mood or your style or whatever by just simply strapping on a different wristwatch.

My favorites are probably my Glashutte Original that was made in 1999, my 1950s Breitling, and my Ball watch, which was made about 1980.

Collectors Weekly: How did the accuracy of the wristwatch evolve over time?

Hess: I think that it probably started out with the race to get a watch on the railroad. There were a lot of companies in the 1930s and ‘40s that had fine watches that were accurate. Rolex is one of the forerunners in having an accurate watch in Switzerland. But in America, the race was on in the ‘50s to develop a watch that would be accurate enough to work on the railroad. That was a huge thing at the time.

The railroads were the number one form of transportation, and if watches were off by a few seconds, there’d be a bad train wreck, so it was important to have a watch that kept good time. When all the men wanted wristwatches, the race was on to make an accurate wristwatch. That was huge thing in the 1950s. Finally they were able to convince the powers that be that the watches were in fact good enough to be on the railroad, and then it happened in quick succession. It was Ball first, Accutron second, Elgin third.

Ball was the first watch to be allowed on the railroad. It was made in America, but it used a Swiss movement. Accutron was primarily Swiss, so Elgin was the first 100 percent American-made watch used on the railroad. Right after those three came Hamilton and a whole host of other watches. The big rush to get a watch that was accurate enough for the railroad was a good advertising ploy, too, because it would say, “Hey, we’re accurate enough to be on the railroad!”

A Rolex Wristwatch

Then quartz watches came along. Quartz watches are more accurate than mechanical watches, but hardly anybody collects quartz watches. Whether it’s Vacheron Constantin or Patek Philippe, almost none of the real good watch companies use quartz movements. They may make a couple of lines in quartz or they may make some ladies’ watches in quartz, but primarily they’re automatic.

Even though the automatic watches are not as accurate, men prefer to have an engine on their wrist. They prefer to have a watch that is mechanical. I think it’s the same reason that a man doesn’t want an automatic transmission in his Porsche. A racecar doesn’t have an automatic transmission, and I think it’s the same kind of mentality. Men want to see the gears. They want to see the jewels. They want to see the movement.

But scientists prefer quartz. I was invited to an Astronaut Hall of Fame dinner once and I couldn’t wait to find out what watches they wore. I was thinking they would wear Omega or Rolex. It turned out that most of them wore quartz watches, because to a scientist who goes into space, accuracy is everything. Quartz watches are definitely more accurate but not nearly as popular, not even close. There’s probably a hundred fine watches made for every one in quartz.

Also, most watches since the 1960s have had a calendar (day and date) feature. There are very complicated watches that have perpetual calendars that even account for a leap year. They did that with gears and now with quartz; it’s quite fantastic.

Collectors Weekly: Were wristwatches always expensive or did something change that made them pricier?

Hess: Yes, there was a change. The Swiss took over the market and they could pretty much do whatever they wanted. At one time, the Swiss made a lot of very cheap wristwatches that they imported to the USA, and that ruined the American watch market. But now the Swiss control the market and they make extremely fine wristwatches. It’s not cheap to make these fine watches. A very fine watch in the 1950s would cost $395. Today a fine watch costs $10,000 or more.

Collectors Weekly: How do people tend to collect wristwatches?

Hess: Some people collect by the maker, some collect by style. Some people want watches that keep very good time.

An Elgin Watch Company Wristwatch

An entry-level collector could get together a fantastic collection of early watches for next to nothing. You could certainly go to the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors meetings and gather up a tremendous collection of watches for very little money. Also, the last 10 years or so has been wonderful for collectors with eBay because you could just sit in your home and make a huge collection for yourself.

I go to NAWCC shows, flea markets and auctions as well – almost everybody does – but it’s so easy to find watches online now. A lot of the guys who are collectors eventually start selling off some of their watches, and when they do, they usually set up a webpage.

The digital age has also helped the research aspect of it. The NAWCC.org site has been a tremendous boon with the research of old watches. It helps all of us determine the validity of watches, how many were made, etc.

Supply and demand determines rarity of a wristwatch. In other words, say Rolex made a watch that was unpopular and they only made it for three years. Thirty years later, that watch is extremely sought after. It was unpopular in the 1950s so they didn’t make very many, and that makes it very popular today. Interesting, isn’t it?

Collectors Weekly: Do wristwatch collectors also collect clocks and other timepieces?

Hess: Generally speaking, a watch guy isn’t a clock guy. Pocket watch guys may have a small wristwatch collection and wristwatch guys may have a small pocket watch collection, but generally they tend to stay away from clocks.

Collectors Weekly: If somebody was new to collecting wristwatches, what kind of advice would you have for them?

Hess: Start small, but buy the best you can. Buy one expensive watch rather than multiple cheap watches because in the long run you’ll be happier and the value of your collection is more likely to increase with the more expensive watches.

I wrote a book called The Best of Time about Rolex, and that’s a good book. Everybody says it’s the bible of Rolex. Then, of course, there’s Guide to Watches by Cooksey Sugar, and then I would just use the Internet. The Internet is chock full of information.

Collectors Weekly: Thank you very much Jeff for taking the time to talk with us today.

(All images in this article courtesy Jeff Hess)

By Maribeth Keane and Jessica Lewis, Collectors Weekly Staff (Copyright 2009)

Noreen Marshall is the curator of the Dress, Doll, and Childhood collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood in London. Recently, we spoke with her about the history of dolls, the various materials used and types of dolls that were made, and how dolls have evolved over time. Noreen can be contacted via the Victoria and Albert’s Museum of Children microsite, which is a member of our Hall of Fame.

We have a very small team here at the Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood, so we all have to do lots of different things. I don’t look after all the dolls, but I oversee the collections. I do the waxes and the woodens. I’ve got colleagues who are in charge of the cloth ones and the plastic ones and the porcelain ones and so on. I used to do all of it. When Caroline Goodfellow took early retirement about 10 or 11, years ago, I had to take on the whole doll collection as well as all my other things. The costume and the child care collections are pretty big on their own. I enjoyed doing it, but I’m getting towards the last part of my museum career, so I have to get some of my younger colleagues involved again.

Young Girl Doll made by Henry Pierotti in about 1870

I’ve worked for the Victoria and Albert Museum since 1974. I loved dolls as a child—I still do—but I never thought I’d become a doll curator. Caroline, who was a consummate doll curator, actually disliked dolls as a child. But dolls get you. You can’t resist them, really. Some people don’t like them, and I find that quite strange. We’ve got a lovely wax baby doll from 1900 in mint condition. It was lying in a box on the table and someone said, “Take it away from me. I can’t bear dolls, and I certainly can’t bear wax dolls.” Oh, dear. They’re not that scary, are they?

When I was a child, I collected dolls with costumes from different countries. Lots of people did then. If you knew somebody who was going to Spain, they’d bring you back a Spanish doll in a Spanish costume.

All sorts of people like different kinds of dolls, and I think it’s just terrific that there are so many collections and collectors around. There have been so many different dolls in the last 50 years and so much marketing has gone into them, it’s almost impossible to keep up. That’s why I think a lot of people who collect dolls specialize.

For example, Olivia Bristol at Christie’s is the president of the Doll Club of Great Britain. She told me that when she started working for Christie’s, everybody collected wax dolls, but then people got so frightened about how to preserve them that they started to go for the ceramic ones instead (most people who collect dolls collect ceramic dolls). But all dolls are breakable, even plastic ones.

Collectors Weekly: When were wax dolls first made?

Marshall: They started right at the end of 18th century. It’s hard for us to realize now just how shocking wax must’ve been for people who saw them for the first time. They tend to discolor and crack over time, but when they were new, wax dolls were much more lifelike than anything people were used to. Before that, there were only wooden or cloth dolls, and occasionally poor children made their own from odds and ends. They would put sticks together and make a doll-like thing.

The poorer children would have to be more ingenious. They made them themselves, or their parents or older brothers did. If you didn’t come from a family with a lot of money and you didn’t live in a town, you’d be very much thrown back on your resources for playthings.

Dolls were often the main plaything for children, but there were also dolls that were kept as family relics. There’s a doll in this museum called the Old Pretender Doll. She was given by King James II or his son to a family who were loyal to the Stuart cause. That doll would probably never have been a plaything—it was preserved and revered because it came from the King.

Collectors Weekly: Do a lot of people collect the 19th-century dolls?

Marshall: Yes. That’s when dolls really took off because of mass-production. You had people like John Edwards who had a factory set up and turned out dolls in large numbers. Before that, if you were making wooden dolls, for example, they had to be turned and carved and painted, all fairly labor-intensive things and done in a workshop rather than a factory.

Dolls were used to spread fashions.

The 19th century was the age of industrialization with doll making. That’s when it started. Other people made dolls professionally before, but they couldn’t have turned out as many dolls as, say, Simon & Halbig would have. Simon & Halbig was one of the biggest firms in Germany, making its own dolls as well as ceramic doll heads for other doll manufacturers to their client’s specifications.

Collectors Weekly: What do the numbers on the back of an antique doll mean?

Marshall: One is its mold mark, the other is the size of the doll. The heads and bodies were usually made in two different places, so the numbers helped to match up the right sizes. The two pieces might have been made in the same factory but by different people. If you don’t join the correct head size to its corresponding body, the result looks extremely odd.

Collectors Weekly: Were wax and ceramics the two major materials used for dolls in the 19th century?

The Old Pretender Doll made about 1680. Said to have belonged to King James II at Holyroodhouse in Edinburg.

Marshall: Yes, I’d say so. You still had some wooden dolls around, and you can’t necessarily say what people were using to make homemade dolls. There were still cloth dolls at that time, but they were often either made at home or made very cheaply.

Into the 20th century, you get people making art craft dolls. Some of the German dolls from this period are almost like sculpture. There were still wax dolls around the 20th century as well. I can’t remember precisely when Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote A Little Princess, but the little girl in that classic childrens book had a wax doll.

The Pierottis were still making dolls in the early 20th century, but I think in general by then most manufacturers were principally producing ceramic dolls rather than wax ones. And then there were new experimental materials like celluloid.

Composition dolls started in the 19th century. They’re almost a byproduct of the wooden dolls. Although every manufacturer had its own recipe, the composition was made principally from wood pulp and mixed with things like plaster, egg shell, and other materials to give it a certain amount of shine. Although the composition is relatively unbreakable, it doesn’t always hold up over time—it often cracks. But if the composition recipe is produced just right, it is very tough, so a lot of people preferred to give young children composition dolls with cloth bodies.

Collectors Weekly: Did the materials vary by region?

Marshall: I think the Germans mostly used ceramics and the English mostly used wax, and then you’ve got the Americans and the Germans making composition dolls. There were ceramic dolls in England, too, but not so many.

One of the things that did not vary much, at least at first, was doll design. For example, many of the people who were making dolls in the States were of German origin or were familiar with the German doll industry. You certainly have very distinctly American dolls like Izannah Walker’s, but I think it took a while for the mass production side to catch up. Some manufacturers’ dolls are more immediately identifiable than others, and some companies started in Germany before going to the States. Both countries were big enough to export, that was the thing.

If you look at the French dolls’ high status and high price, you’ll see why they just couldn’t compete with the Germans in the end. The French made ceramic dolls at the same time as Germany, but never on the same scale and not as industrially. Also, the French dolls always had slightly more cachet. They were supposed to be posher and more expensive and better produced. They certainly had wonderful clothes, whereas I think many of the German dolls were sold either naked or wearing a chemise. The idea behind those German dolls was that the child learned to sew by making clothes for it (and of course it was more satisfying for a child to make a small dress for a doll than a big dress for herself because it took far less material and it was quicker). The French dolls were often sold with beautiful clothes.

But that’s only in some cases. Generalizations are always a problem. Certainly once you’re into the late 19th and early 20th centuries, you get some very characteristically American dolls like the Kamkin dolls or the Martha Jenks Chase dolls.

Collectors Weekly: Who were some of the major doll manufacturers during the 19th century?

Marshall: The two biggest ones in Germany were definitely Armand Marseille and Simon & Halbig. They were bigger by far than anybody else. In France, you’ve got the Societé Francaise de Bébés et Jouets, or SFBJ, but that was really an amalgam of doll manufacturers trying to be economical. Jumeau and Bru are the two best known individual French makers. In England, there were a lot of different people making wax dolls. There was Lucy Peck, the Pierottis, and the Montanaris, to name just three firms.

Collectors Weekly: Is it common for the wax dolls to survive?

Marshall: Far more than you think. Although we tend to think of wax as a really fragile material, it can actually be quite tough. What it really can’t stand is huge variations in temperature. People always talk about the dangers of wax dolls and heat, but in fact they’re just as badly affected by great cold. If your wax doll is somewhere cold and the temperatures plunge overnight, that can crack the wax just as surely as being overheated can damage it.

At least one manufacturer, Charles Marsh, made dolls that he said were suitable for the tropics. Putting them in front of the fire wouldn’t do them any good, but merely being in a hot climate wouldn’t necessarily melt the wax doll, especially if it were kept at a steady temperature. So yes, wax dolls are quite easily damaged in a way, but then so is just about everything else.

That’s one of the things that’s been holy grail of doll manufacturing—the unbreakable doll. But that really doesn’t exist because even plastic dolls break, and in recent years, some of the soft vinyls in particular are decomposing and the dolls are starting to give off an ammonia kind of smell.

Collectors Weekly: Were the features on antique dolls realistic?

Marshall: They weren’t realistic to start with. They were a bit like portraiture. Portraiture is not always an exact science. It’s sometimes an impression of what the maker or painter thinks its subject ought to look like. Our Old Pretender doll, for instance, is not in proper proportions. Actually, proportions are something which are always skewed in dolls. They’re often quite unrealistic. They may have tiny feet and hands but very big heads. The most money went into producing the heads, so I think that was why they were often much bigger. The hands and feet on these dolls are so tiny that they wouldn’t be able to stand upright if they were real, but the feet didn’t matter, particularly when they’re wearing long dresses, so some were very crudely finished.

Collectors Weekly: Did dolls have specific names?

Kewpie Doll made by German manufacturer J.D. Kestner in 1930.

Marshall: That started in the 19th century. Lots of manufacturers gave their dolls names like My Darling Baby, My Lovely Baby, My Baby, My Dream Baby. The My Dream Baby dolls were terribly popular and they made them in all sorts of different sizes.

Then there were the mechanical dolls that really weren’t for children to play with. They were often for grown women as prestige objects or for families. A lot of them had china heads as well. Different countries made them, but mostly France. They would be mounted on a box and you would wind them up and they’d move. Some of them performed quite complex actions. Some of them would glide along the floors, sometimes raising their arms. We got a Lambert doll recently; she had lost her costume, so we were trying to work out what she could’ve worn by looking at her actions. It’s really quite difficult. They also made an incredibly complicated doll that represents a little girl trying to catch a butterfly. It shows you the butterfly moving and the doll trying to put the net down to catch it.

And of course you had the decorative boudoir dolls. They wore fancy costumes and and were meant to be displayed on a bed. In the end, they often got played with by children, but initially they were just to sit on the bed and look decorative. There was a big revival of those dolls printed on cotton sheets in the 1960s and ’70s. Lots of craft shops sold the pattern for the doll and clothes printed out on a roll that you could make.

Collectors Weekly: Could you tell me a bit about Kewpie?

Marshall: Kewpie dolls were based on illustrations by Rose O’Neill in the Ladies’ Home Journal. They’re ceramic and they have Rose O’Neill’s name, usually on the feet. Of course there were a lot of imitations. Apparently the original Kewpies were produced by Borgfeldt, which was a New York company, and I think they were subsequently made by a German doll manufacturer called Kestner.

Dolls like these were often treated as mascots. They sat on your bedroom shelf and looked cute. But some people did play with them. You just have to be a bit careful. The characterization of a Kewpie is this naked, cute child, so it’s slightly going against the character to put clothes on it, but of course little girls did dress them up and treated them as dolls in the ordinary way. The only bits that move are the arms, so they’re fairly solid.

Collectors Weekly: What are some other doll types?

Marshall: There was the multi-faced doll, which was a doll with a head that is molded with three faces. You just turned the head around to change the doll’s face. They were first made in wax, and then they progressed to ceramic and plastic. They look jolly bizarre if you take the bonnets off because part of the illusion depends on the far-forward bonnet to cover the rest of the faces.

We’ve got wax dolls representing some of Queen Victoria’s children—one of Prince Albert Edwards, one of Prince Arthur, and one of Princess Louise. Madame Montanari specialized in those. And I think there are some dolls in collections from the States which are supposed to represent Martha Washington.

There are also wizard dolls and gypsy dolls, just about any character you like. People can project anything they like onto a doll. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why they’re so popular.

The bisque dolls come in during the second half of the 19th century. They eventually took over from the wax. For a long time, both were produced, but there were more of the china and ceramic ones. Certainly more survived.

Collectors Weekly: How many dolls do you have in the collection at the museum?

Wax Boy Doll made about 1860.

Marshall: We figure it’s about 8,000. Some of them were dolls that were bought at auction. Some were bequeathed to us, sometimes from a collector, sometimes from somebody who wanted a good home for a treasured childhood playmate.

We can’t possibly display them all. In fact, we had to reduce when we redid the displays in 2003 and 2006. We haven’t got as many dolls on display, but we’re about to redo things again so that there will be more. We’ve just redone our costume display, and I want to put more dolls in there. Many of them are on display for a long time and the light fades the clothes. Collectors are often interested in different maker’s dolls, so they would often prefer the dolls to be shown without clothes on, but the general public likes them best with clothes, so you have to try and satisfy both.

Even though I am a curator, I would really hate it if all the good dolls were in museums. For example, I collect children’s books. One organization I used to belong to sent out a notice saying, “Your members must start willing and bequeathing their collections to museums and libraries or they won’t be preserved.” But at the same time, they were wondering how they could interest young people in collecting. So if we give out all of our collections to museums, there will be no books available for younger collectors to acquire. Same with the dolls. I think it’s brilliant that there are still so many fine ones out there.

Collectors Weekly: How do people determine what type of dolls to collect?

Marshall: Some of them are only interested in ceramic dolls. Others are only interested in American dolls. Some are only interested in dolls that represent famous people. Others might collect just one manufacturer. Some dolls are always going to be out of a collector’s reach unless they’ve got lots of money because they’re so scarce. Another problem is that people these days forge dolls, which is something that I’m sure nobody ever thought of 50 years ago.

There was talk of a gang that was going around to museums and trade fairs and stealing dolls, not so much for the value of the dolls but so that they could replicate them exactly and pass off their copies as the real things. So there has been a certain amount of fakery. We have three wooden dolls called the School for Scandal dolls. We bought them thinking they were genuine 18th-century dolls, but they were made in the 1930s.

Collectors Weekly: If a doll isn’t marked, how do you identify its maker?

Marshall: If your doll doesn’t have a mark, you need to consider what it’s made of. If it’s a wax doll, it can’t be a Kamkin doll. Likewise, if it’s a cloth doll, it can’t be a Jules Steiner doll. There are manufacturers who cross over, like Kestner who went from bisque to celluloid for instance, but there aren’t that many. Most manufacturers are associated with one material.

Collectors Weekly: If somebody is new to the world of dolls, what advice would you give them?

Novelty Egg Doll in a box made 1870 - 1889

Marshall: Collect what you like. If a thing doesn’t engage you but you buy it anyway for its potential value, it’s always much more possible that you’re going to be deceived and it’s not going to be quite what you think it is. If you want to collect dolls, use books and the Internet. Take advantage of all the wonderful color photographs that are out there so that you know what you’re looking at.

Go around and look at sales and auctions. Even if you don’t want to bid, you can actually go and look at the dolls and handle them and talk to people.

Look into the United Federation of Doll Clubs in the States and the Doll Club of Great Britain. They have websites and publications.

Collectors Weekly: What are some good books about dolls?

Marshall: I still think that the good books are very worth saving up for. One of my favorites is Mary Hillier’s The History of Wax Dolls. You think, “Well, this says copyright 1955. Surely somebody must have written another book since.” But this really is a great book.

Caroline Goodfellow’s The Ultimate Doll Book is good, too, because she divides up the subject by materials. She does wooden dolls, composition dolls, poured wax, porcelain, bisque, and so on. It’s a very enjoyable book with lots of illustrations. The Coleman Collector’s Encyclopaedia of Dolls is great, too.

Collectors Weekly: Is there anything else you’d like to say?

Marshall: Dolls were used to spread fashions. I’ve even heard of dolls being used to smuggle intelligence in times of war. They’ve been around as long as we have, practically.

I think dolls are sometimes a way for children to be in charge. I have heard people express anxiety that they don’t encourage affections, but I think they do. They’ve provided us with all sorts of usages throughout all the centuries, and people have derived a great deal of pleasure out of them.

Collectors Weekly: Thank you so much Noreen for taking the time to talk with us!

(All images in this article courtesy the doll collection at the V&A Museum of Childhood in London )

By Maribeth Keane and Jessica Lewis (Copyright 2009)

Dave Weisbart talks about 19th-century clocks, discussing notable manufacturers and designs and sharing his experience with clock repairs. Dave is the owner of Prestige Clock Repair in Huntington Beach, CA and shares his clock collection on his site, Dave’s American Clocks.

I was working as a jewelry department manager for a department store, and I had a customer who brought a clock in for repair. I was able to fix her clock very quickly and easily, and I didn’t charge her anything. It turned out she had a huge collection, and she asked me to see the rest of them. She had these amazing 18th-century bracket clocks and 18th-century tall-case clocks. She had a gorgeous skeleton clock and even an Atmos clock. So that planted the seed, but it was many years later before I could actually afford to own an antique clock. Then one became three and three became six and now I have about 60 clocks at home.

My first clock was an Ansonia. The model number on it was Sonia 1, and it was a Westminster chime tambour clock. I still have it.

Collectors Weekly: So you knew how to repair clocks?

Pompeii by Ansonia Clock Co., New York, NY ca. 1880 - 1900s

Weisbart: No, but if you have 60 clocks at home, you better learn how to fix them yourself! That was basically it. I was interested in being able to service my own clocks and having the confidence of being able to buy a clock and know that even if it needs some kind of repair, I’m capable of handling it and I’m not going to be spending $300 for a clock and then spending another $250 to get it working.

I’m very active in the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors (NAWCC). The people in the chapters are very eager to share their knowledge and expertise when it comes to buying, selling, and maintaining these old clocks. Some of the fellows in the group took it upon themselves to show me how to do certain tasks. I had books that I had read and I just found it all very interesting and I enjoyed working on them tremendously.

I had a job in the computer field, but the writing was on the wall that I wasn’t going to be there much longer and I could not get a job interview anywhere else. So I thought, well, let’s try this, because every time I did take a clock in to be repaired, there was a huge wait, which is still the case because there are fewer and fewer people doing this kind of work. I went back to the NAWCC School of Horology in Pennsylvania and completed their entire clock repair program. I came back and hung out my shingle, as they say.

The NAWCC divides up a total of 10 courses into one- and two-week sessions. They try to schedule them in such a way that you can live there and go through the entire program in just under five months. You can also just go there for a couple weeks, take a course, and come back. A lot of people do that.

My graduating class was only 17 people for the whole country. What you have is this tremendous generational gap where the repairmen are now in their 80s and 90s. They can’t do the work anymore, but there’s nobody coming up behind them.

The thing that people need to be aware of when they’re taking a clock in for repair is that there are guys out there who learned from some guy who learned from some other guy. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re doing things wrong, but it does increase the likelihood that the techniques they’re using to repair clocks are not what you’d call state of the art. That’s another reason that I wanted to go the school. I wanted to learn the right way to do things. The teacher at the school had access to all of the books that have been written and all of the experts that have come forward with their methods. The NAWCC also has the National Watch and Clock Museum. The people who worked as the curators there are obviously working with museum-quality timepieces, and they’re doing things the way they should be done. So we got a good grounding in a production-mode repair service, which is probably most of what I do, as well as a museum-quality restoration-and-repair service, which very few people can do.

Just to throw out one museum-repair example, typically when a clock movement gets badly worn, it needs bushings. The bearing holes for the gears wear to the point where they are no longer round. Because they’re out of alignment, the gears don’t deliver power efficiently. In a new clock, it’s a pretty straightforward matter to pop in a commercially available bushing, but I did a piece that was from the late 1700s. When I went to put in a bushing there, I wanted to make sure that unless you really looked at it under magnification, you wouldn’t know that there had been a bushing put in there. They refer to that as an invisible bushing. So that’s an example of maintaining a clock in its original appearance to the greatest extent possible.

Collectors Weekly: Is it common for collectors to need clock repair?

Weisbart: If you’re going to run any mechanical clock, it’s going to need periodic service. That’s just a fact. The modern clock oils last probably about five years tops. Many clocks will continue to run after the oil has dried out, but at that point, they start doing damage to themselves. They’re running with dry pivots that have an accumulation of old dried oil and dirt which acts as an abrasive, and it starts wearing away at the parts.

A common misconception about clock oil is that it helps the clock run, and in fact the opposite is true. If you’re running a clock just for two minutes or something, it actually has its greatest efficiency running without oil. But the oil prevents wear and so that’s why the movement needs to be disassembled, cleaned, and then reassembled with fresh oil every few years.

Collectors Weekly: You said you specialize in 19th-century American clocks?

Weisbart: In my own collection, yes. When I first started, I just bought clocks that appealed to me, but as I got into it more, I decided to specialize in American clocks, and the ones that appeal to me the most are from the latter half of the 19th century. It’s the early age of industrialization in the clock business. Any collector gets more from their collections when they start to think about specialization.

Triumph by Ansonia Clock Co., New York, NY ca. 1880 - 1900s

One of the reasons I decided on that particular part of clocks is that it’s well documented. There are a lot of books out there that illustrate and document the early clock production in the United States, whereas it’s much harder to come by information on some of the European makers. I can look at an Ansonia clock, for example, and say, “Yes, that’s from around 1895,” because the factory catalogues are, to a large extent, still available from that era. They’ve been republished.

The same cannot be said for European clockmakers. There’s a German maker Junghans. That name is actually still around, but I don’t think it’s anything to do with the original company. Junghans was a huge clockmaker, and I’ve never really seen anything akin to what I can get on the American makers as far as documentation is concerned.

I do have a couple of clocks that go back to the 1830s. Up until, say, well, 1809, clock production was one man sitting at a bench, cutting gears one at a time, putting movements together one at a time. It was in 1807 or 1809 that Eli Terry got a contract to build a bunch of wooden clock movements. He was to build 3,000 movements over a three-year period. That was referred to as the Porter contract. He was the first one to really mass-produce clock movements, but they were wooden movements and they still had issues. They weren’t all that reliable.

It wasn’t until 1840 that Chauncey and Noble Jerome came out with the rolled brass, inexpensive, and mass-produced clock movement. That was the beginning of the major part of the industrialization of clock making. Most of the clocks that show up now in any kind of numbers are going to be from the last half of that century. There are just fewer clocks around from the earlier part of the century.

For the most part, they were handmade unless you’re talking about a wooden-movement clock. The wooden-movement clocks were mass produced.

Collectors Weekly: Who were the major makers during the 19th century?

Weisbart: In terms of the industrial era, Seth Thomas of course is probably the best known name. Seth Thomas started making clocks in 1813, doing the same thing as everybody else—mass producing wooden-movement clocks. Chauncey Jerome was the first to do the mass-produced brass clocks. That company became Jerome & Co. It was purchased by New Haven, another big name in clock making. They started in the 1850s and were around for a long time. Ansonia is another really big one, again from the 1850s. They went out of business in 1929. The bulk of my collection is Ansonia.

So you got Seth Thomas, Ansonia, and New Haven. Gilbert is another one, plus Waterbury and Ingraham. To a lesser extent, there’s a maker in New York called Kroeber. He didn’t make as many clocks as some of the others, but they’re very interesting and he had a lot of interesting patents.

The real heart of clock making was Connecticut. Later, some companies moved to New York but most of the makers got their start in Connecticut. They set up mills and would use water from local streams to power their factories. I think a lot of it was happenstance—there just happened to be clock making going on there. There were also vendors who sold to the clock manufacturers. An example is Muller who sold iron fronts for clocks. The Waterburys and people like that would make the movement and the wooden back, but the front was this cast-iron piece, or cast zinc. That was very decorative. Nicholas Muller made them for everybody.

So there were a lot of people making parts and you wanted to be near those parts suppliers. If so-and-so had their factory in Bristol, Connecticut and somebody else was making parts for them in Bristol, Connecticut, it made sense to set up shop nearby.

Collectors Weekly: So wood was used before brass?

Column and Splat by R&I Atkins ca. 1833 - 1837

Weisbart: In terms of a mass-produced clock, yes. Brass clocks have a long history. Up until the 1840s, the parts were cast brass. They actually poured molten brass into a mold and then machined it as needed. Cast brass was expensive and it wasn’t a very high-quality material to work with. It would tend to be porous and have air bubbles and that sort of thing. It wasn’t as strong as it could’ve been, which means that you needed to use thicker brass to achieve the same strength. Later rolled brass would be used, and that was a much stronger material.

A lot of the individual makers made the brass movements on a small scale. The wooden movements were also being made on a small scale until Eli Terry and the Porter contract figured out how to mass-produce them and make clocks for the general public. If you were rich, you could afford a brass-movement clock, which made it all the more appealing. When Jerome and the rest of them started coming out with the rolled-brass movements, that became the status symbol as opposed to the old-fashioned wooden works.

Here’s a little tidbit: There’s a song called Grandfather’s Clock, and it was actually the most popular song in America. It was originally published in 1867, and it’s the source of the term grandfather clock. They were never called that before that. The words of the song had to do with an old-fashioned standing tall-case clock that belonged to your grandfather. The image of the big wooden works clock was something old fashioned that belonged to your grandfather. In 1867, the only people left with that kind of clock was your grandfather because you would get a modern brass-movement clock. Before that, it was just called a clock, really.

Collectors Weekly: Were all the clockmakers doing something different?

Weisbart: For the most part, the early ones in particular tended to copy each other. For example, when Eli Terry came out with the pillar-and-scroll case design, it was immediately copied. It was very popular and everybody had one. Everybody was making them and circumventing patents one way or another.

The same thing happened with the patented Willard banjo clock. Some makers actually licensed the design from Willard while others would put Willard’s Patent on the glass when in fact they weren’t paying anything. The variations of the designs tended to be very slight. If you had a clock with curved columns, you’d have slightly different carving from one to the next. But the makers would all churn out what was popular at the time.

Collectors Weekly: What were the popular designs in the 19th century?

Beatrice by Gilbert Clock Co. ca. 1910

Weisbart: Early in the century, you’d have to say the banjo clock, pillar-and-scroll, column-and-splat. This is all the first half of the century. After the brass movements became popular, then you had steeple clocks, which are also referred to as sharp gothic. And of course the ubiquitous OG clocks were hugely popular. They were inexpensive to make and they just took over.

An OG clock is basically a great, big rectangle, and the frame on the front has sort of an S curve molding all the way around like a picture frame. The term for that S curve molding in the lumber industry is ogee, so these became the OG clocks.

The original OGs were weight-driven, so they needed to be fairly large so the weights would have room to fall as they powered the clock. As springs became more reliable, some of the makers started making a small OOG which was spring-driven, and they didn’t have to be as large as the big one. The OOG refers to an additional curved molding on the outside of the frame. There’s a thin strip of molding all the way around, and then you see the thicker strip, which is the S curve. Then you see the door of the clock. But that thin strip on the outside, if that’s curved, then that’s an OOG. That’s not really a standard designation, but some people used it.

The reverse-painted tablets have a whole history of their own. In the very early days the tablets were hand-painted. Typically women did that work, and they would paint clock glasses. There came a point where the clock production got to be so big that hand painting everything wasn’t viable anymore, so they started using various shortcuts. They’d have stencils and transfers and other semi-mechanical ways of transferring images on to the glass so that they could make more of them. Reverse glass painting is a lost art. I’m having one made right now for a really beautiful wooden-works clock that I bought recently but had really horrible replacement glass in it.

Collectors Weekly: How long does it take to hand-paint that?

Weisbart: The woman I’m dealing with asked for six to eight weeks. A lot of that has to do with the fact that she’s using oil paints which need to dry, so she can only paint for a little while, let the paint dry, and then paint some more. In terms of how long it actually takes her to actual do the painting, I couldn’t tell you. My dad’s an artist and I kept trying to get him to do reverse glass painting, but he never picked it up.

Collectors Weekly: Were there any designs that were more sought after than others?

Weisbart: At the time the clocks were being produced, everything was just sort of a commodity. Whatever the retailers were offering at the time, they’d convince the customer that it was the latest style, and they’d go ahead and buy it. Again, there wasn’t that much variation for the first half of the 19th century, and in the second half, the big clock makers would put out catalogues with etchings and illustrations of their case styles so the retailers could carry a representative selection. Then they could also show the customer the catalogues and say, “If there’s anything else in here that you’d like.”

I think what led to some of the big clockmakers going bust was that they came out with just a myriad of very similar styles. Towards the turn of the 20th century, they had enormously thick catalogues of the same thing over and over again.

But in every year there were the styles of the era. It’s the same thing today. Today, if you find a really nice original pillar-and-scroll clock, you’re going to pay a lot of money for it. Among the wooden clocks, those are probably the most desirable. There are many that followed that you can get for dirt cheap. The other one would be the Willard banjo. One made by Willard or by his heirs or family is very desirable.

Collectors Weekly: Why is the pillar-and-scroll so desirable?

Weisbart: It’s an iconic design of early clock making. It has pillars along the sides, little turned columns basically, and the top has a gooseneck split pediment scroll. It’s an early Eli Terry design, and Eli Terry is revered. He was at the beginning of a whole clock-making dynasty that went on until the 1870s. The cases themselves tend to be fragile, the feet in particular. The bases had these little spindly feet, and they tended to get broken. It’s an immediately recognizable design.

Collectors Weekly: Did the number of models that were made vary depending on the maker?

Weisbart: Yes. Of all the companies, Ansonia probably had more models from the time they started until the time they went out of business than any other maker. Tran Duy Ly went to great lengths to compile the extensive factory catalogues into individual volumes, so you can buy a book of Ansonia clocks that has virtually every catalogue illustration. Ly has also published catalog compilations for Waterbury, Ingraham, Seth Thomas, all of them. The Ansonia one is the thickest because they had more styles than just about anybody else, and of the makers I’ve mentioned, Kroeber probably had the fewest styles.

Kroeber wasn’t in business all that long, and he wasn’t nearly as large as some of the other ones. Ansonia was big. At one time they had factories in both Connecticut and New York, but they eventually closed the Connecticut factory. The building that they occupied in Brooklyn still exists and has been turned into co-op apartments.

Collectors Weekly: You said Ansonia’s your favorite?

Queen Elizabeth by Ansonia Clock Co., New York, NY ca. 1894 - 1920s

Weisbart: Yes. I like the diversity of their line. They tended towards the rather heavily ornamented clocks, a lot of statue clocks, and the carved walnut clocks of the 1880s. They’re really gorgeous.

The name Ansonia comes from an industrialist by the name of Anson Phelps. He owned a brass foundry and he approached these two clockmakers, Terry and Andrews in Connecticut, because he wanted to take controlling interest in their firm and have them use the brass that his foundry was making in clocks. He was becoming vertically integrated, and so his job was to sell metal.

I like the Ansonia Pompeii clock. I own one and I’ve always really enjoyed it. Ansonia had a lot of metal clocks and they had extensive line of enameled iron clocks. Their cast-iron cases were painted shiny black, to imitate the French black slate clocks that were imported from Europe, but at a price that the average person could afford. Pompeii was one of these, but it’s a very interesting design with sloped curved sides and lots of little decorations on the side. It’s just a very interesting-looking clock and it’s unique to the Ansonia line. Nobody else made that particular style. Mine has dials made out of gutta-percha, a hard rubber substance that Ansonia used for a short time. It’s in such great shape.

I’m also always on the lookout for clocks made of green onyx, also sometimes referred to as Brazilian onyx. The American makers made some green onyx; the French tended to make a lot of them. Typically when I see a green onyx for sale it’s French, but if I see an American clock with green onyx, I’m likely to buy it regardless of the state of my checkbook.

Collectors Weekly: What other types of materials did clockmakers use?

Weisbart: If you’re talking about wood, you’re talking about what was locally available. Some makers used a lot of walnut in their cases and exotic woods like rosewood as veneers over pine. Typically the OG clocks were like that. You had a nice veneer but a pine case because the pine was readily available. Then there are the metal cases. Ansonia was probably the king of the metal cases. They not only made the enamel iron cases, but they also made a lot of statue clocks, or spelter clocks, which had some sort of base metal, mostly zinc with some sort of a finish on it to make it look like bronze.

In the 1880s and 1890s, the typical mantle clock with a big glass door (which they often call a kitchen clock now, but that’s actually a misnomer) tended to be walnut, but as they got into the 1900s, there was a shift to oak. Then they moved away from carved pieces to steam-pressed pieces. They’d actually use steam and very high pressures to impress the design into the wood instead of carving it. Obviously this was an inexpensive way to get a carved look without carving. In terms of woods, it would parallel whatever the fashion was for furniture of the day. If walnut was in fashion, they’d use walnut. If mahogany was in fashion, they’d use mahogany.

Collectors Weekly: Do people collect clocks by types of wood?

Weisbart: No, I don’t think so. I think the most important thing to serious collectors is condition. If you’re buying a wood piece, you want to have its original finish if at all possible. You want to have good-looking dials. In this era, you’re looking at painted dials for the most part, and that’s typically a little earlier, say from 1870 back.

In the later years, you’d see paper dials. If you have a painted dial, you want it to be free of chips as much as possible. If you have a paper dial, you don’t want to see it abraded or for the paper to be dark and stained. Porcelain dials tended to chip or crack. The dial’s pretty important, so look at the condition of the case and the condition of the dial before you buy.

Collectors Weekly: How do I know if the clock I’m considering is any good?

Weisbart: Depending on your own repair or servicing capabilities, you want a clock with a running movement, or at least a movement that can run. Often you’ll start up a clock and give the pendulum a little push. It might tick for five minutes and then quit. If that’s the case, then chances are it just needs normal service. That’s something you have to be prepared to do anyway.

If you give the pendulum a push and you don’t hear anything, that’s a red flag for a broken spring. Springs often take other parts of the movement with them when they break, especially in American clocks, whose springs were very powerful. When the spring breaks and lets all that potential energy go at once, it’s very common that neighboring gears and shafts will get bent and gear teeth will get sheared off and broken. That’s when you start getting into significant repair costs. So if the clock you’re looking to buy is ticking, even if it doesn’t continue to run, that’s a good sign.

Another trick is to advance the hands and listen to it strike the hour. Striking the hour and ticking, even if it’s striking sluggishly or if it doesn’t tick very long, is a good indication that the movement is basically healthy but probably needs some service.

Collectors Weekly: How were the 19th-century clocks influenced by early clock making?

Weisbart: They were probably mostly influenced by furniture styles of the times. For example, if you look at the early tall-case clocks, the ones made in the late 18th century and into the 19th century, you’ll see the same variations. On the Antiques Roadshow, those twin brothers look at a piece of furniture and say, “This is made in Philadelphia,” or “This was made in Rhode Island,” because each of these areas had regional characteristics for furniture making. You see that a lot in the early tall-case clocks where you can identify where the case came from, if not the movement.

In the early days of clock making, the clockmakers did not make the cases; they made the movements and bought the cases from furniture makers. They would install the movement in the case and sell it as a complete clock. But in later years, with their own factories, they were making clocks to appeal to the entire country. You’d still see that the Eastlake style of furniture carried over into certain clocks, for example, so if your home was in that style, you’d buy a clock in that style. Most of the makers came out with a small line of Arts and Crafts style cases.

Collectors Weekly: How do you date a clock?

Cabinet No. 16 by Kroeber Clock Co., New York, NY ca. 1880

Weisbart: Again, that’s where the documentation comes in very handy and why I initially chose to go with American clocks. If you pick up a catalogue reprint that was originally printed in 1880 and your clock is in there, you know pretty much when the clock was made. Some collectible clocks—let’s say from 1850 to 1930—persisted much longer than others, and each year had its own characteristics.

The OG clock was made for decades, the same thing with what’s referred to as a drop octagon wall clock where you have an octagonal bezel or sort of a façade with the big clock dial inside. Hanging down from that is a little square pointed piece at the bottom where the pendulum swings. It’s also known as the schoolhouse clock and it was made for decades.

So if you look at one of those, how the heck do you know? Sometimes you can’t know. Other times you can look at the movement and you might see a patent date. That can give you the earliest that that particular clock was made, although the patent dates were sometimes stamped in the movements for 20 years after the patent.

Collectors Weekly: How did Seth Thomas, Ansonia, and Ingraham become the biggest manufacturers?

Weisbart: For the most part, they had a driving force who was a real go-getter and worked hard to establish the brand, distributing infrastructure, and sales force that would work on the retailers and get them to carry the clock. For example, Kroeber was a very smart man, but I don’t think he had the sales part of it figured out very well, whereas Ingraham was a case designer originally, but he was very much a businessman. Gilbert actually made clocks. He was just a businessman.

In addition, there was definitely a hunger in the country for affordable clocks. One of the things that I find so interesting is that the manufacture of clocks piggybacked on the Industrial Revolution in a symbiotic way—we had the ability to make inexpensive clocks, coinciding with the masses need for clocks so they could show up at the factory on time. It worked both ways.

Collectors Weekly: What is a lever movement?

Weisbart: Most of the clocks that I have, the larger clocks, have pendulums that swing back and forth. The other variety of movement uses a balance wheel like a watch. Now, in a good-quality watch movement, you have jewels that are the bearings in the sliding surfaces of the escapement. A lever movement is typically rather cheaply made, it uses a balance wheel, and instead of the jeweled escapement, it’ll just have a couple of tins stuck in a lever that rocks back and forth. They’re inexpensive, but not particularly good timekeepers. Most of the novelty clocks with the lever movements were one-day clocks, which meant you had to wind them every day.

Our perception today of timekeeping is very different than it has been throughout history. The only ones who really needed the kind of precision that we expect today were the railroads because they had to make sure their trains didn’t run into each other. For the average factory worker, if his clock was accurate to within three minutes or so a day, it wasn’t a big a deal.

Collectors Weekly: Have you noticed any trends in 19th-century clock collecting?

Weisbart: It’s interesting to watch the trends because they do shift a lot. For example, Ansonia in particular made a lot of porcelain-cased clocks, typically hand-painted. I have seen the price on those fluctuate dramatically. When they were in vogue, you’d pay a lot of money for a nice porcelain clock, and then they slipped out of fashion and people paid less. Another market segment that went through that kind of bubble was the Vienna regulators. These are typically German and Austrian clocks from the late 19th century, and those were going crazy for a while. It’s like anything else. You get these little bubbles.

Collectors Weekly: Is it common to not find original parts in a clock?

Green Onyx clock by Ansonia Clock Co., New York, NY ca. 1900

Weisbart: I wouldn’t say it’s common, but probably the biggest issue related to originality would be what we call a marriage. This was done quite a bit, particularly in the first half of the 20th century. You would have a movement taken from one clock and put into another. So if the clockmaker bought some junker clock that had a decent movement, he’d throw away the case and keep the movement. And if another clock came in where the movement was so badly worn that it wasn’t worth fixing, he’d pop this other movement in. So you might see an Ingraham movement in a Gilbert clock or something to that effect, and those are referred to as marriages.

The telltale sign of a marriage is extra mounting holes in the case. If you look at the back of the case where the movement is mounted and you see a set of holes that aren’t being used, that’s a real good indicator that it doesn’t belong. In the case of American clocks, it’s often a lot easier than that to tell because American makers in general put their trademark on everything. So the dial has a trademark and the movement has a trademark, and sometimes the pendulum bob has a trademark. You can look at those and say, “This doesn’t match that,” and it’s pretty obvious. If a pendulum bob is not original, it’s not that big of a deal, but if the whole movement is not original, then that clock is going to be much less valuable than if it had the correct movement in it.

Collectors Weekly: What’s your advice to new collectors?

Weisbart: Join the NAWCC. It’s that simple. They have a great publication that comes out six times a year—a nice, glossy magazine with really interesting articles. And join the local chapter, because the NAWCC is a worldwide organization. For example, in Southern California there are 10 local chapters, and right now I’m president of Chapter 69, which is the Orange County chapter. The chapter meetings are where you really get to network. You get to meet the people who are interested in the same things that you are.

For example, in our chapter we have a mentoring program for people who are relatively new to collecting. Let’s say somebody is interested in American pocket watches, well, we know just the guy to talk to who knows all about American pocket watches. That way, new collectors get a pretty quick grounding in what they’re interested in.

Collectors Weekly: Thank you so much Dave for talking to us.

(All images in this article courtesy Dave Weisbart of Dave’s American Clocks).