PROCEEDINGS OF THE POLYTECHNIC ASSOCIATION. 409 



which the particles gradually arrange themselves. Finally, after travers- 

 ing numberless hands the perfect instrument emerges and is laid aside for 

 registration. There is something equisitely light and graceful in all 

 the processes through which it moves from its inception to the completion. 

 As its elements are tiny and fragile, so the hands which combine them are 

 light, and swift, and noiseless. Microscopic atoms coalesce; gossamer 

 filaments thread the embryo organism; by and by life is breathed into the 

 completed structure, and it palpitates forever with passionless iteration. 

 The artificers are not exactly like other artificers. The work upon which 

 they are occupied involves acute intelligence and dexterous touch. The 

 lightness and the cheer of the factory itself must doubtless have its whole- 

 some influence upon the operatives. Certainly the impression which they 

 leave upon the mind of the visitor is very different from that which follows 

 a visit to workshops in which grosser wares are manufactured. The cot- 

 ton and iron workshops of Lancashire and Birmingham are populous with 

 hungry and discontented creatures, bending over distasteful tasks in dim 

 and imperfectly ventilated galleries. Sheffield generates formidable sta- 

 tistics of maladies occasioned by some of the processes of the manufacture 

 of cutlery. Here among the comfortable artificers of Waltham there ap- 

 pears to be less of the prose of toil. Their industry is set to music. It 

 does not blacken and bruise the hands, nor wrinkle the brow, nor strain the 

 muscles, nor distort the frame. The great majority of the hands employed 

 are Americans — New England men and women — whom a few years of ex- 

 perience have rendered as dexterous and as expert in their craft as the 

 best among the continental artisans. 



The operations of the Company have steadily widened since its estab- 

 lishment. At present it employs more hands and produces more watches 

 than at any former period. Each year contributes testimony to the ex- 

 cellence of the instruments, and increases the demand for them. New 

 varieties of form and quality have been from time to time introduced to 

 accommodate peculiar exigencies of taste or necessity. There is the costly 

 time-piece for the millionaire, and the inexpensive one for the clerk, or 

 student, or artisan. There is the compact and tiny watch, jeweled and 

 enameled, which ladies delight to wear at their girdles, and which they 

 never remember to wind up. The varieties are so ample as to satisfy all 

 the demands of utility or caprice. And it is but moderate eulogy to say 

 that in exterior form and embellishment, no less than in interior excellence, 

 they are fully equal to the best instruments of European importation; and 

 this notwithstanding the fact of their comparative cheapness. 



The success of the Waltham Company helps to solve an interesting pro- 

 blem. It is a kind of Declaration of Independence of old world ingenuity 

 and skill. If we can make our own watches, we should certainly be able 

 to excel in the other branches of manufacture in which Europe has hither- 

 to led us. The factory at Waltham is the promise of other factories in- 

 numerable, which shall stud New England as thickly as her spires and 

 school-houses, and in which the glass ware of Bohemia, the carpets of 

 Berlin, the china of Sevres, the silks of Lyons, the jewelry of Paris, and 

 countless other articles of luxury and use, shall be produced upon our own 

 soil and by our own skill. 



