In 1798, Whitney secured a contract to manufacture rifles for the government. He decided that they could be made much more rapidly and cheaply if he could find some way to produce all the separate parts in large quantities by machinery, and then merely assemble the various parts into the completed weapon. The inventive mind which was capable of devising the cotton-gin found this new problem to be comparatively simple, and it was not long before Whitney was making thousands of rifles from machine-made "standardized parts," where only one could be made before. Half a century later his machinery was still turning out rifles parts in the great arsenal at Springfield, Massachusetts, and it was not until this period that it exerted a distinct influence upon watch-making.
While Howard in Roxbury was dreaming of producing watches by machinery, another young man—Aaron L. Dennison, of Boston—was also obsessed with the same dream and grappling with the same problem. It is therefore not strange that the paths of these two soon crossed. Born in Freeport, Maine, 1812, Dennison was just a year older than Howard. He was an expert watch-repairer and watch-assembler, having learned his craft among the Swiss and the English workmen in New York and Boston. The year 1845 found him conducting a small watch and jewelry business in Boston.
Some few years earlier, Dennison had visited friends in Springfield, Massachusetts, and while there he was taken to one of the interesting show-places of the town—the Springfield Arsenal. As he made his slow progress through the great rifle factory, he marveled at the wonderful machinery and the system which had originated in the brain of Eli Whitney nearly half a century before; Whitney was dead and gone, but his works still lived.
Dennison returned to Boston, fired with an ambition to apply the Whitney system and methods of rifle-making to the manufacture of watches. He brooded over the scheme for years, constructing a pasteboard model of his imaginary watch factory and planning in detail its organization.
Then occurred a meeting that was to make history—a meeting marking the first step in founding a great American industry and wresting from Europe and Great Britain the watch-making monopoly which they had continuously held since the days of the "Nuremburg Egg." Dennison met Howard, and the contact of the two minds was like the meeting of flint and steel. Dennison shared Howard's belief that watch-parts could be made better and more accurately by the use of machines. He had the watch-making experience and Howard the mechanical skill to design the new machinery. One may imagine how the two young men inspired each other. They had the ideas; all they now needed was the capital and this was supplied in 1848 by Mr. Samuel Curtis, who backed them to the extent of twenty thousand dollars.
Dennison immediately went abroad to study methods in England and Switzerland and came back more than ever convinced of the soundness of their own ideas.
"I have examined," said he, "watches made by a man whose reputation at this moment is far beyond that of any other watchmaker in Great Britain and have found in them such workmanship as I should blush to have it supposed had passed from under my hands in our own lower grade of work. Of course I do not mean to say that there is not work in these watches of the highest grade possible, but errors do creep in and are allowed to pass the hands of competent examiners. And it needs but slight acquaintance with our art to discover that the lower grade of foreign watches are hardly as mechanically correct in their construction as a common wheelbarrow."
