Time Telling through the Ages

by Harry Chase Brearley

Reached the extreme of elaboration and costliness, but were not always equally successful as time keepers. In the collections of the Metropolitan Museum.

On his return, in 1850, he and Howard established themselves in a small factory in Roxbury, under the name of the American Horologe Company. And that little factory was the foundation of what is now the great establishment of the Waltham Watch Company, the first and hence the oldest watch company in America, and the parent concern of most of the rest.

It was perhaps at this time that an employee, one P. S. Bartlett, returned to his home town on a visit and was asked by his old neighbors what he had been doing.

"I am working," said he, "for a company which makes seven complete watches in a day." Great was the merriment at this reply. "Why, where on earth could you sell seven watches a day?" they shouted.

With the advent of the factory, the real troubles of Dennison and Howard began. It is worth while to glance for a moment at the problem which lay before them, if only to appreciate its difficulty. The old plan was to have a model watch made by hand by a master workman. This watch was then taken apart and its separate parts distributed for reproduction by a multitude of specialized workers involving perhaps some forty or fifty minor trades. These parts, hand-made after a hand-made model, were then returned to the expert who assembled and adjusted them. At the worst, this resulted in gross error; at the best, in individual variation. A part from one watch could not be expected to fit and work accurately in another, although the two were supposed to be alike in all their parts.

The new idea was first to lay out the whole design on paper and then to make the various parts by machinery according to the exact design. It was supposed that a machine making one part would duplicate that part repeatedly without variation; that in so far as the machines themselves were accurate, the parts produced would necessarily be interchangeable; that any set of parts could therefore be assembled without fitting or alteration. The finished watch, it was assumed, would require adjustment only. Theoretically, this idea was correct; practically, it could not be perfectly carried out, and the results did not fulfil the hopes of the manufacturers. In the first place, there were not in existence any machines of the required delicacy and precision; every one must first be invented, then designed, then made, and finally adjusted for practical operation. Even so, and notwithstanding the great mechanical achievements of the Waltham Company, the results never succeeded in realizing the dreams of Howard and Dennison, of absolute interchangeability of parts. It remained for the Ingersoll organization, many years later, to develop such a factory system.

Before Howard and Dennison could make a single watch, therefore, they had to invent all the mechanism, and themselves build and install every invention. Moreover, several of the processes had to be worked out from the ground up. There was nobody in America who understood watch-gilding, for example, or who could make dials or jewels.

Thus they set to work developing the machinery as fast as they could do so, and imported such parts as they themselves could not yet make. It was a staggering task and a discouraging devourer of capital. "I do not think," said Dennison many years later, "there were seven times in the seven years we were together that we had money enough to pay all our employees at the time their wages were due. Very often we would find ourselves without any cash on hand, but Mr. Howard would manage some way to produce enough to tide over with."

The two men made a perfect team, eager to give each other credit, and each having unbounded loyalty and confidence in the other and in their enterprise. But, curiously enough, it was Howard, the artist and dreamer, who seems to have developed into the business man of the two, in addition to being the inventor and engineer, whereas Dennison, the expert watch-repairer, became the designer and originator of plans. It was said of him long afterward that there was probably never an idea in American watch-making that had not at some time passed through Mr. Dennison's resourceful mind. He is known to many as the "Father of the American Watch Industry," although he insisted that Howard deserved the title as much if not more than he. Dennison schemed out what was to be done, while Howard found the money and invented the machinery with which to do it.

Their first model, an eight-day watch, was Dennison's idea. It was found to be impracticable and was soon abandoned in favor of a one-day model. The name of the company had to be changed, because it did not find favor with some of the English firms from whom they bought certain parts. They called it the "Warren Manufacturing Company" for a time, and their first few watches were marked with this name. Later on, they moved to a new factory at Waltham and incorporated under the name of the Waltham Improvement Company. It was while the act for its incorporation was before the Massachusetts legislature that some wag there produced the couplet: