Inventions in the Century

by William Henry Doolittle

Switzerland in watch-making followed precisely the example of Germany in clock-making. It commenced there in the seventeenth and culminated in the nineteenth century. Many thousands of its population were engaged in the business and it flourished under the fostering care of the government—by the establishment of astronomical observations for testing the adjustment of the best watches, the giving of prizes, and the establishment and encouragement of schools of horology conducted on thorough scientific methods. A quarter of a century ago it was estimated that in Switzerland 40,000 persons out of a population of 150,000 were engaged in watch-making, and that the annual production sometimes reached 1,600,000 completed movements. The whole world was their market. The United States alone was in 1875 importing 134,000 watches annually from that country.

As in Germany, so one characteristic of the Swiss system was a minute sub-division of the labour. Individuals and entire families had certain parts only to make. It is said that the Swiss watch passed through the hands of one hundred and thirty different workmen before it was put upon the market. The use of machines was also, as in Germany, ignored. By this national devotion to a single trade and its sub-division of labour, the successful production of complicated watches became great and their prices comparatively low.

The United States in the commencement of its career and at the opening of the century had no clocks or watches of its own manufacture. But it soon followed the example of Germany and Switzerland and established cheap clock manufactories, first of wood, and then of metal, which became famous and of world-wide use. But it could make no headway against the cheap labour of Europe in watch-making, and the country was flooded with watches of all qualities, principally from Switzerland and England. Finally, at the half-way mark in the century, the inquiry arose among Americans, why could not the system of the minute sub-division of human labour followed in watch-making countries so cheaply and profitably, be accomplished by machinery? The field was open, the prize was great, and the government stood ready to grant exclusive patents to every inventor who would devise a new and useful machine. The problem was great, as the fields abroad had been filled for generations by skilled artisans who had reduced the complicated mechanism of watch-making to a fine art. Fortunately the habit had been established in America in several of the leading industries, principally in that of fire-arms, of fabricating separate machinery for the independent making of numerous parts of the same implement, whereby uniformity and interchangeability were established. Under such a practice, which was known as the American system, a duplicate of the smallest part of a complicated machine, lost or worn out thousands of miles from the factory, could soon be furnished by simply sending the number or name of such required part to the manufacturer, or to the nearest dealer in such machines.

With such encouragement and example the scheme of watch-making was commenced. Soon large factories were built, and by the time of the Centennial Exhibition in 1876, the American Watch Company of Waltham, Massachusetts, were enabled to present an exhibit of watch movements made by machinery, which astonished the world. Other great companies in different parts of the country soon followed with the same general system. Machines, working with the apparent intelligence and facility of human minds and hands, and with greater mathematical accuracy than was possible with the hands, appeared:—for cutting out the finest teeth from blank wheels stamped out from steel or brass; for making and cutting the smallest, finest threaded screws by the thousands per hour and with greatest uniformity and accuracy; for jewel-making; for cutting and polishing by diamonds, or sapphire-armed tools, the rough, unpolished diamond and ruby, crysolite, garnet, or aqua-marine, and for boring, finishing and setting the same; for the formation of the most delicate pins or arbors; for the making of the escapements, including forks, pallets, rollers, and scape wheels; for making springs and balances, including the main-springs and hair-springs; for making and setting the stem-winding parts; for making the cases, and engraving the same, etc. The list would be too long to simply name all the ingenious machines there exhibited and subsequently invented for every important operation.

It was the aim of these manufacturers to locate every great factory in some quiet and attractive spot, free from the dust of town, and city, and divide it into many departments, from the blacksmithing to the packing and transportation of the completed article; and to conduct every department with the best mechanical and mathematical skill that money and brains could provide.

The same system was followed with equal success in producing the first-class pocket-chronometer for the nicest work to which chronometers can be put.

Thus with every watch and its every part made the exact duplicate of its fellow, uniformity in time-keeping has been established; and the simile of Pope is no longer so correct, “’Tis with our judgments as our watches, none go just alike, yet each believes his own.” A simple statement of this system illustrates with greater force than an entire volume the revolution the nineteenth century has produced in the useful art of horology. And yet the story should not omit reference to the application of the electric system to clocks, whereby clocks at distant points of a city or country are connected, automatically corrected and set to standard time from a central observatory or other time station.

Great as were the advances in horology during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the number of inventions that have been made in the nineteenth century is evidenced by the fact that in the United States alone about 4,000 patents have been granted since 1800, which, however, represent not only American inventors but very many of other countries.

Registering Devices.—Devices for recording fares and money have employed the keenest wits of many inventors and is an art of quite recent origin. Attention was first directed to fare registers in public vehicles, the object of which is to accurately report to the proper office of the company at the end of a trip, or of the day, the number of passengers carried and the fares received. Portable registers, to be carried by the conductor and operated in front of the passenger have been almost universally succeeded by stationary ones set up at one end of the vehicle in open view of all the passengers and operated by a strap and lever by the conductor. These fare registers have been called “A mechanical conscience for street car conductors.”

Cash Registers, intended to compel honesty on the part of retail salesmen, are required to be operated by them, and when the proper lever, or levers, or it may be a crank handle, is or are touched, the machine automatically records the amount of the sale, the amount of change given, and the total amount of all the sales and money received and paid out.