Antique and Vintage Pocket Watches

Despite the prominence of American brands like Bulova and Timex, the wristwatch industry has been largely dominated by European manufacturers for more than 100 years. Pocket watches were also a European invention, appearing on the continent during the 16th century, but for one brief shining moment, the timepieces produced by American pocket-watch manufacturers were the envy of the world. The American pocket-watch renaissance began in 1859, when the remains of the Boston Watch Company of Waltham, Massachusetts, was renamed the American Watch Company, which would become the Waltham Watch Company in 1925. Two events fueled the renaissance—the poaching of American Watch Co. employees by rival National Watch Co. of Elgin, Illinois, in 1864, and the subsequent drive by both firms to streamline production. At the time, watchmakers around the world were still making all their parts by hand before assembling those parts into a working pocket watch. Executives at American and National could see that building pocket watches on an assembly line would make their companies much more productive and allow them to sell their goods at a fraction of the cost of handmade watches. According to pocket-watch dealer and historian Tom McIntyre, one of the biggest obstacles to pocket-watch manufacturing was figuring out how to design the machinery required to make all of a watch’s gears, shafts, plates, and springs. Though these parts are tiny, the machines needed to produce them had to be much more massive than the engineers at American and National had thought, but by the early 1870s, American Watch Co. pocket watches were winning awards internationally. Naturally, this did not go unnoticed by the Swiss, who were miffed to see their watchmaking primacy challenged by automated, New World upstarts. While it took a few decades for the Swiss to catch up to the Americans when it came to production, they quickly exceeded them when it came to quality. By the middle of the 20th century, the pocket-watch industry in the United States had pretty much disappeared. Another nail in the coffin, of course, was the rise in wristwatches. Why reach into one’s pocket in order to tell the time when it is so much more convenient to simply glance at one’s wrist? Thus, between competition from abroad and a change in the timekeeping habits of would-be customers, the heyday of pocket watches in the United States was relatively short, running from the last decade or so of the 19th century until somewhere in the 1920s. That’s when companies such as National (which became Elgin), American (which became Waltham), Hamilton, and Illinois were timekeeping kingpins. One industry that aided the popularity of pocket watches during this period was the railroad. Engineers and conductors needed highly accurate, precision timepieces in order to maintain their strict schedules, which were strict not so much for the convenience of passengers but for their safety—because different trains were often scheduled to run on the same tracks at different times, knowing the correct time was a matter life or death. This meant, in part, that the dials of railroad pocket watches were always easy to read at a glance, but railroad pocket watches were also specially calibrated to keep constant time regardless of their position, be it vertical or horizontal. In addition, the crown, or stem, which is used for winding, had to be customized for the railroads. To meet railroad specifications, pocket watches had to be fitted with a lever or other mechanism that would lock the watch hands in place while it was being wound, lest a conductor accidentally change the time during winding, which could prove catastrophic. Other styles of vintage and antique pockets watches include those outfitted with hunting cases, which was popular during the 19th century. Hunting cases have a closed cover that flips open when you push a button. When closed, it protects the watch’s crystal, which was a legitimate problem for hunters knocking about in the wilderness. But by 1900, the open face watch had taken over and hunting-case watches became less common. Closed or open, pocket-watch cases were made of different metals like silver or gold. Less expensive watches had gold-filled cases, which were constructed of two thin sheets of gold sandwiching a thicker layer of brass between them. Pocket watch cases were also made of a wide variety of silver-colored materials, with names like silveride, also usually nickel-based. Although gold watch cases are appealing to collectors, many of these cases don’t necessarily house the timepiece’s original movements—gold cases are sometimes sold for the value of their metal, while movements can wear out and be replaced. Inside vintage pocket watches, the shafts on the wheels were usually made of steel, while the plates could be made of different kinds of brass, the most common of which was nickel brass, also known as nickel plate. Gears also tended to be made of brass, but some were made of steel, and gold was even used on the highest grade watches. The last indicator of antique pocket watch quality is the number of jewels used in its movement. Seven stones are the minimum, 17 are not unusual, but pocket watches housing 20 or more jewels are rare. Jewels such as rubies—natural or synthetic—are used as bearings on a movement’s pivot points because they produce very little friction, which means they keep a watch's time accurate. Often these jewels are set in gold, which is then set within the metal movement itself.