Time Telling through the Ages

by Harry Chase Brearley

More than twenty years now passed before another effort was made to produce watches in America—this time by two brothers—Henry and James F. Pitkin of Hartford, Connecticut. In 1838, they brought out a watch, most of the parts of which were made by machinery, but it proved more or less a failure. After a brief struggle, they gave up in discouragement. Henry Pitkin died in 1845, and his brother, a few years later.

While the Pitkin Brothers were struggling with their problem in Hartford, Jacob D. Custer of Norristown, Pennsylvania, was engaged in a similar task. He succeeded in making a few watches between 1840 and 1845, thus gaining his niche in history as the third American watch manufacturer.

But all of these were merely forerunners, for now there stepped upon the stage a young man whose ability and perseverance were destined to launch American watch-making fairly upon its way. This young man was born in Hingham, Massachusetts, in 1813, and his name was Edward Howard; it was born in him to be an inventive and ingenious craftsman and to feel toward the mechanism of time-keeping the devotion of an artist to his art. At the age of sixteen, he was apprenticed to Aaron Willard, Jr., of Roxbury, one of the cleverest clock-makers of his time.

Young Howard took to clock-making as naturally as a Gloucester man takes to the sea. Some of the clocks he then made are still ticking as vigorously as ever. Having presently learned all he cared to know about clock-making, he cast about for other fields of action. His bent, as he himself said, "was all for the finer and more delicate mechanism," and it was natural that these qualities of the watch should absorb his interest. It was equally natural, since he was an American clock-maker at a time when that trade was being revolutionized by machine-work, that he should dream of applying such methods to the watch.

"One difficulty I found," he is quoted as saying, "was that watch-making did not exist in the United States as an industry. There were watchmakers, so-called, at that time, and there are great numbers of the same kind now, but they never made a watch; their business being only to clean and repair. I knew from experience that there was no proper system employed in making watches. The work was all done by hand. Now, hand-work is superior in many of the arts because it allows variation according to the individuality of the worker. But in the exquisitely fine wheels and screws and pinions that make up the parts of a watch, the less variation the better. Some of these parts are so fine as to be almost invisible to the naked eye. A variation of one five-thousandths of an inch would throw the watch out altogether, or make it useless as a timepiece. As I say, all of these minute parts were laboriously cut and filed out by hand, so it will readily be understood that in watches purporting to be of the same size and of the same makers, there are no two alike, and there was no interchangeability of parts. Consequently it was 'cut and try'. A great deal of time was wasted and many imperfections resulted."

Howard's ambition lay in the production of a perfect watch for its own sake; and he wanted to make it by machinery, believing that, in that way, it could be made most perfectly. Other people had thought of the same thing. Pitkin had attempted it, and there had been some experiments of like nature in Switzerland. But the man who loves his work as Howard did will succeed in anything short of the impossible, because neither time nor labor, neither failure nor discouragement, matter at all to him as against the hope of making his dream come true.

As Howard was emerging into young manhood, the great period of American invention was rapidly developing. Morse was struggling with the electric telegraph which he invented and perfected in 1835, and Goodyear was busy with machinery and processes for enabling rubber to be used commercially, thus laying the foundation for one of the greatest American industries of to-day. Ingenuity was in the air and invention was conquering realms that had been believed beyond reach.

When people told Howard that it was absurd to think of improving upon the manual skill of centuries, he answered that he expected to make his machinery by hand. And when they said that a machine for watch-making would be more wonderful than the watch itself, he only laughed and agreed that this might be so.

To-day, we are familiar with such phrases as "standardized parts" and "quantity production," which explain to us how it is possible for a single factory to produce millions of watches in a year, or for another kind of plant to turn out half a million automobiles in a like period. The way in which "quantity production" came about is curiously interesting. Watch-making received one of its greatest impulses from a famous American inventor who probably would have been amazed had anyone told him that his idea upon quite another subject would some day help to put watches into millions of pockets.

There is no particular connection between a cotton-gin and the "quantity production" of watches, but it is interesting to know that the same ingenious brain which designed the one also unconsciously suggested the other. Late in the eighteenth century, Eli Whitney gained lasting fame as the inventor of a machine which would automatically separate the seeds from the fiber of crude cotton—a machine which revolutionized the cotton industry of the south.