Object Details
- manufacturer
- Waltham Watch Company
- American Waltham Watch Co.
- Oliver B. Marsh
- Oliver B. Marsh, for American Watch Co.
- Description
- The first firm to mass-produce watches by machine was the American Watch Company of Massachusetts. Oliver B. Marsh, one of the firm's earliest watchmakers, designed and made this watch as a prototype.
- The appetite for watches in the United States in the early part of the 19th century was huge; about $46 million worth were imported between 1825 and 1858, especially from England Switzerland. To tap into this market, a few Americans attempted to develop watches domestically, but probably no more than two thousand watches were made in the United States before the 1850s.
- In that decade, watchmakers at what would become the American Watch Company of Waltham, Massachusetts, developed the world's first machine-made watches. They completely redesigned the watch so that its movement could be assembled from interchangeable parts made on specialized machines they invented just for that purpose. They also developed a highly organized factory-based work system to speed production and cut costs.
- The firm was launched in 1849 in a corner of the Howard & Davis clock factory in Roxbury, near Boston, where Edward Howard and Aaron Dennison experimented with completely new designs for watches and the machines to make them. With expert help from a cadre of experienced mechanicians and funding from Howard's father-in-law, the Boston mirror maker Samuel Curtis, the enterprise got under way.
- Dennison had absorbed techniques for the mass production of firearms with interchangeable parts during a visit at the Springfield Armory. The primary measures the new firm adopted from arms making were a tight organization, a critically important machine shop, and a manufacturing system that relied on models. Waltham designers made a model watch and a master set of gauges to fit it, and every watch part made thereafter was measured against the corresponding model part.
- In its first decade, the firm's work was largely experimental, but by late in 1852, Howard and Dennison finally had products-seventeen watches, made mostly by hand by brothers Oliver and David Marsh. One of these prototypes, a watch made by Oliver Marsh, survives in the collections of the museum.
- O. B. Marsh's watch was large compared to other pocket watches of the time. The white- enamel dial indicated minutes around the rim and featured four smaller dials indicating hours (at 6:00) seconds (at 12:00), days of the week (at 9:00) and date (at 3:00).
- The design of these first watches, eight-day movements with two mainsprings, gave way to a simpler one, a watch that ran on one mainspring for a little more than a day. Although superficially similar to English watches of the time, the new American watch featured a mainspring in a "going barrel." This meant a watch without the traditional fusee and chain to equalize the force of the unwinding spring. This was a watch with fewer parts to make.
- The next hundred Waltham watches, built on the new model, took until the fall of 1853. The third batch of nine hundred sold for just $40 each, cased. An imported movement of the same quality cost twice as much.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Credit Line
- Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph W. E. Bourgeois
- 1849-1851
- ca 1852
- ID Number
- ME.334625
- accession number
- 310796
- catalog number
- 334625
- Object Name
- pocket watch
- Physical Description
- gold, 18 k (case material)
- enamel, white (dial material)
- Measurements
- overall: 3 1/8 in x 2 5/16 in x 5/8 in; 7.9375 cm x 5.87375 cm x 1.5875 cm
- Place Made
- United States: Massachusetts, Boston, Roxbury
- See more items in
- Work and Industry: Mechanisms
- Clothing & Accessories
- Measuring & Mapping
- National Museum of American History
- Record ID
- nmah_1204764
- GUID (Link to Original Record)
- https://n2t.net/ark:/65665/ng49ca746aa-89cc-704b-e053-15f76fa0b4fa
