Thus, when the scheme-trade died away and the company again turned its attention to the watch-dealers whom it had forgotten in the flush of its easy success, it found no welcome. It had forsaken its source of steady customers and was now forsaken in return. After floundering about in several further reversals of trade policy and causing the loss of further investment for its backers, the Waterbury name was abandoned and the company reorganized as the New England Watch Company. As such it ventured into new fields of watch manufacture and offered an elaborate variety of small and fancy watches and cases, and numerous models, sizes, and styles of movements sold on vacillating marketing policies. Never did it attain a genuinely sound footing, however, for it vacated its field of fundamental and distinctive usefulness, viz., the production of a reliable, low-priced, simple watch, to meet the advancing requirements of its day; it had gone back to the view-point of the watch as an ostentatious or ornamental bit of vanity. Hence the old Waterbury business was compelled to close its doors, and in the fall of 1914, the first year of the Great War, was bought out at a receiver's sale by a firm who had replaced it in the field of supplying watches for the masses. This firm rededicated the organization to its original mission, modernized its mechanical equipment, and revived the Waterbury name after a lapse of twenty years, until to-day, through the employment of judicious sales-methods, the factory is more successful than ever it was in its earlier days.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
"The Watch That Made the Dollar Famous"
The next development is so typically American that it is difficult to picture it as occurring in any other country.
Heretofore, the history of timepieces had been that of an easily traceable evolution, for each of its steps had grown naturally out of those before it, and the various improvements had been made by mechanics trained in the craft. Yet now, strange to relate, two young men from a Michigan farm, with no mechanical training, entered the field almost in a casual manner, and in less than a generation not only became the world's largest manufacturers of watches but effected the most radical development in the whole story of telling time—involving, as it did, the introduction of interchangeable parts, quantity-production, and a low price.
These results might seem at first, to be due to a matter of accidental good fortune. On the contrary, they were an example of evolution quite as logical as any that had preceded and were perhaps even more significant. The whole development came as the direct product of observation, analysis, initiative, perseverance, and hard work—the element of good luck being conspicuously absent.
All history gives evidence of the occasional need of a new impulse derived from outside, and bringing with it a fresh view-point. There seems to be a tendency in human enterprise for any development after a time to lose its original rate of speed and to spend itself in complexities. The people who have brought it about appear to lose their power to see things simply and in a big way; and, on the contrary, they grow technical and occupy themselves with minor details. Whereupon the progress of development becomes slower and slower, and threatens to stop entirely. Then over and over again, there is the record of the advent of some fresh new force from an unexpected direction which restores youth and vigor.
In the last decade of the nineteenth century, watch-making seemed ready for such an impulse. As we have already seen, it had long been developing from within along technical and professional lines. Excellent and costly timepieces that were marvels of accurate mechanism had been produced. That part of its work had been well done, but the industry was in danger of losing its human touch. Watches were being viewed more as articles of manufacture and merchandise than as of wide-spread human service in meeting a general public need.
In a sense, therefore, the industry was unconsciously waiting the coming of a non-technical man who knew the public at first hand and understood people's requirements, who was not fettered by tradition, who had a vision of universal marketing and distribution, and who was not held back by a fore-knowledge of difficulties. It was exactly this vision which Robert H. Ingersoll had of the industry and he developed it with the assistance first of his brother, Charles H. and later of his nephew, William H. He did not "discover" the dollar watch, as many think, but grew toward it during the course of a dozen years.