352 WILLIAM A. COUNTRYMAN 



can machinery used in Switzerland has been rendered obso- 

 lete here by the advance of invention; but its adoption there 

 is a most substantial recognition of the superiority of machine 

 made watches. It is also asserted that, while the Swiss watch 

 trade fell off a few years ago, this loss has been partly recov- 

 ered by the adoption of these American machines and Ameri- 

 can methods. 



The earliest watches made in Europe took a year, it is 

 said, in their making, cost the equivalent of $1,500 apiece, 

 and varied in their timekeeping from forty minutes to an 

 hour a day. At the Waltham, Mass., factory nearly 600,000 

 watch movements were made during a single year, or nearly 

 2,000 complete movements for each working day — not quite 

 one a day per employee— more than any other factory in the 

 world and a greater yearly production than any other country 

 except Switzerland. The cost of these movements varies 

 from $3 to $75, and their timekeeping quality is best shown 

 by the fact that the three American watches which received 

 the highest award for accuracy of rate at the centennial 

 exposition at Philadelphia in 1876, showed an average 

 daily variation of only twenty three hundredths of a second. 

 The unanswerable arguments showing the superiority of 

 machine made watches are now widely known and admitted, 

 but they were made only a few years ago with most disheart- 

 ening results. Almost everybody preferred a handmade 

 watch, notwithstanding its greater cost, when of any worth 

 as a timepiece, and the lack of interchangeable parts with 

 which it could be cheaply repaired, on the theory that hand 

 work was more accurate; but now conditions are reversed, 

 and an American machine made watch is preferred by the 

 great number of persons who desire accuracy and durability 

 at a reasonable price. An inventor puts the argument 

 briefly thus: ''If one of the qualities demanded in any certain 

 kind of work be the highest attainable degree of uniformity, 

 it will be readily admitted that the individual workman, with 

 the certainty of constantly recurring periods of fatigue, which 

 make imperative corresponding periods of rest, is at a great 

 disadvantage when in competition with an impersonal and 

 tireless machine which is capable of producing work of a like 



