Then came the World War, and the wrist-watch which had been often ridiculed as effeminate (although it is hard to explain why, since it was first adopted as an obvious convenience in the Army and on the hunting-field—two of the most masculine spheres of activity it would be possible to imagine) was seen at once to be the most easy means of knowing the time in actual warfare. Millions of watches, consequently, were strapped to wrists of soldiers and sailors, and the obvious advantages of the luminous dial placed it in enormous demand. Thus it came about that the scene described in the opening pages was typical of countless instances upon various fronts.
Although a matter of surprisingly few years, considered chronologically, there is a long distance, measured by the scale of progress, between the moment when a young man, glancing casually at the clock on his bedroom wall read wonderful possibilities in its face, and the time when the firm he founded was able to take note of such achievements as these:
Telling Time by Darkness
Many a soldier waited in the darkness for the perilous moment to go "over the top," with his eyes fixed upon the luminous hands and figures of his Ingersoll Radiolite.
Factory facilities producing an average of twenty thousand accurate watches a day; distribution facilities including the cooperation of a voluntary "chain-store system" of more than one hundred thousand independent retailers, all operating upon a common plan and under common prices; a product that has come into the most wide-spread use not only throughout the United States but in the farthest regions of the inhabited earth—which has, in fact, in itself served to turn back the tide by which watches formerly flowed from Europe into America, so that it now proceeds from our shores toward those of Europe and other lands; a name which has become as well known as any in commercial and industrial life, and better than all, the appreciable raising of the efficiency of the human race through universally promoting the watch-carrying habit and putting fifty million timepieces into service. It is altogether an Aladdin tale of modern business.