Antique and Vintage Pocket Watches

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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...
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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,...
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