CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Checkered History
One of those mental marvels who can play fifteen simultaneous games of chess, blindfolded, might be able to form a complete idea of the American watch-making industry in the years that followed the Civil War; all that the ordinary mind can gain is a bewildering impression of change and confusion, with companies springing up, and merging or disappearing, all over the industrial map. Inventions were as thick as blackberries in August and, to investors, as thorny as their stems. Countless revolutionary ideas in watch-making revolved briefly—few evolved, and capitalists, large and small, learned the sobering lessons of experience, as capitalists ever have and ever will.
"Quantity Production" in 1850
When P. S. Bartlett boasted that his company was making seven watches a day, his friends laughed, "Why, where could you SELL seven watches a day?"
With it all, certain points seem to stand out as clearly defined—among them the fact that watch-production appealed strongly to the public mind at a time when the nation, galvanized into intense activity by the great conflict, was entering an era of extraordinary self-organization. This is, of course, significant. The nation's time as well as its forests, mines, and other resources, must be a factor in the growth of public wealth, and this could not be unless it were widely and accurately measured, which, in turn, implied the universal use of the watch.
The later history of American watch-making is, therefore, a story of the formation of many companies, the failure of most, and survival in the case of comparatively few. In the sense of being founded by men whose experience had been gained at Waltham, the Waltham Company was more or less the parent of the majority. Of the failures, it may roughly and broadly be stated that the general trouble was most often a lack of cooperation between technical watch-making skill and business management.
Of the occasional successes due, on the other hand, to perfect harmony between these two factors, the Elgin National Watch Company, established at Elgin, Illinois, in 1864, was one of the first. Its officials and promoters were not watchmakers but business men—a group of Western capitalists who organized the company at the suggestion of a few trained men from Waltham, to whose technical experience and knowledge they gave entire liberty of action from the first. This combination of Western enterprise and Eastern mechanical skill was a great and immediate success. Within six years from its incorporation, the Elgin Company had built its factory, designed and made its own machinery, and marketed forty-two thousand watches. It is said to be the only American watch company which has paid dividends from the beginning. And yet this achievement cannot be traced to anything strikingly distinctive either in the policy or in the product. It was a case of doing rapidly and easily, with vast previous experience to build upon, what the parent company had so long strived to accomplish, and of doing this honestly and well. In a small way, it was like the rapid growth of democratic principles in America, having, as it were, the British commonwealth of a thousand years on which to base itself.