English Opinion of American Watch Manufacture.
In the London circle of Horologists, more attention is paid to the scientific departments than the mercantile; but for all that, a Mr. Henry Ganney has held forth before the “British Horological Institute,” on “American Watch Manufacture.” Though an Englishman, with English prejudices, he certainly gives a very fair and impartial statement of the subject; yet he views it almost entirely in the money-making aspect. He gives all the credit deserved to American enterprise and ingenuity, and yet there is a certain sense of a drawback. He had before him samples of machine work; among others, to quote, “several movements made by the British Watch Company, which flourished and failed about twenty-five years ago; these were machine-made, and the perfection and completeness of the machinery they used for producing these frames has not been equalled, I believe, in America; several machines being used there to accomplish what was begun and completed by one here.”
Mr. Ganney is right in his statement, but the example given by the British Watch Company was the rock seen by the American navigators. One tool, for facing off, truing up, drilling, depthing, and doing all the work on the pillar plate, having cost, before completion, some three thousand pounds sterling, and from its very complexity being utterly inefficient—worse than useless. In the very inception of the American watch manufacture a similar mistake was almost made. Experience and sound reasoning proved, however, that a multiplicity of operations in any one machine rendered it entirely too complex, the adjustments too numerous, and the work totally worthless. We shall in another number refer again to Mr. Ganney’s lecture, and perhaps give some beamings of light on the early history of the American watch manufacture, derived from personal observation at the time.