THE REVOLUTION IN WATCHMAKING 353 



kind. It is also evident tliat if the large number of required 

 pieces, whose function is the same, can be made with dimen- 

 sions exactly uniform, there would result a great reduction 

 in cost of manufacture because of the avoidance of any in- 

 dividual or special fitting of the various parts." In the hand 

 system it is impossible that parts, upon which a hundred 

 different personalities have been stamped, should come to- 

 gether with the precision required for such a delicate mechan- 

 ism as a watch, llie further the division of hand labor is 

 carried the greater become the chances of imperfection; but 

 with automatic machinery the most delicate processes are 

 accomplished with complete uniformity and finish. 



M. Edouard Favre-Perret states that 40,000 workmen 

 in Switzerland each make an average of 40 watches yearly. 

 But the average in the United States in 1880 was 150; at 

 Waltham it is over 250. It takes about five months to com- 

 plete a single watch of the highest grade; but all processes 

 are going on simultaneously, and the flow of the product is 

 therefore continuous. In a lecture before the Horological 

 institute of London, more than thirty years ago, an English 

 watchmaker who had visited the Waltham factory remarked : 

 ''On leaving the factory, I felt that the manufacture of 

 watches on the old plan was gone." 



Various sporadic attempts, beginning, it is said, as early 

 as 1809, had been made in this country to manufacture watches 

 by hand, but all had ended in dismal failure, owing to inability 

 to compete in price with the Swiss made watch. When com- 

 petition with Europe was thus found impossible, inventors in 

 the United States thought they might construct them suc- 

 cessfully by machinery, and in 1838 Pitkin Brothers estab- 

 lished a plant at Hartford, Conn., for the manufacture of 

 watches by machinery. After manufacturing about eight 

 hundred movements, they were compelled to abandon their 

 project. At this time the Swiss were using machines for 

 special operations in making watches. In 1839 Gischot estab- 

 lished a factory at Geneva, Switzerland, for making the 

 movements of a watch by machinery, and a few years after 

 F. P. Ingold, another Swiss, elaborated a series of both case 



Vol. 7-33 



