Making Watches by Machinery

This is an excerpt from an article published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in July 1869 (Vol. XXXIX, No.230, pp.169-182)

As we step aboard the Galena train at Chicago we observe the placard, "Pacific Express; does not Stop at Way Stations." We ponder behind the locomotive for forty miles; then the brakeman ends our reverie by shouting "Elgin".

Leaving the train, we gaze down upon a far spreading little city, with courthouse, academy, and churches upon commanding knolls, brick blocks and broad streets, cottages pleasantly shaded with oak, maple, and poplar, a woolen mill, a flouring mill, a butt-and-screw manufactory, and a milk-condensing establishment that ships its product to New York-all beside the bright river which cuts the town in twain, and is spanned by a gossamer iron bridge; and over the housetops, a mile away, the tall chimney of the National Watch Factory.

In the spring of 1864 half a dozen active business men of Chicago, heard a fascinating description of the leading Massachusetts watch factory. Yo their willing ears it was a story with a moral, and this was the moral: "If Boston can make watches by machinery and Chicago can largely supply the Northwest, Chicago can make watches by machinery and largely supply New England." It was the genuine, audacious, self-reliant Western spirit. Practical workmen assured them that with the investment of a hundred thousand dollars in buildings and machinery they could begin to turn out watches. They added fifty per cent to this estimate for a margin, and with that blessed unconsciousness of the difficulties before them, without which no great enterprise would ever be undertaken, they organized the National Watch Company, and in November the work began.

After two years and a half spent in constructing the hundreds of intricate machines and erecting the buildings, in May, 1867, the first watch was completed. Not, however, until long after the first hundred and fifty thousand dollars was exhausted-that barely sufficed for a beginning. Before the enterprise was self-sustaining more than five hundred thousand dollars bad been expended, and its owners and friends would doubtless have doubled that sum rather than permit it to fail.

The watch factory of twenty years ago-let pencil and graver fix its humble features ere the place which once knew it shall know it no more forever. The tiny building, with its sign, "John Smith, Watchmaker," the single room, eight by ten, with its counter, showcase, and window bung with watches, and its one workman, who repaired fifty watches a year, and "made" two or three at odd times. Here and there one of these establishments yet exists, but it is as really a relic of antiquity as a hand-loom or a wooden plow.

The National Watch Factory at Elgin is a specimen of the great museums of machinery and beehives of workmen which have pushed it from its stool. The front, shown * in our illustration, is two hundred and forty feet long. Several other wings are hidden in the rear, The cars of the Fox River Railway deliver material at the very door.

My first view of the factory yard was toward the close of the noon hour ' when the employees were pouring back from dinner. It was a fair picture. On one side the gleaming river, with white and spotted cattle grazing upon its bank; on the other a grove of young oaks, their leaves falling from autumnal frosts; in the foreground scores of ruddy-cheeked girls sauntering back toward their work, while quiet artisans smoked their cigars and meerschaums upon the factory steps and a little platform where a band of operatives discourses music on Saturday afternoons in summer. A dozen young men were jumping, with dumbbells in their hands, each trial calling out shouts of applause or merriment; and a score of boys playing baseball as if their salvation depended upon it. Suddenly the great bell set behind the factory struck for one o'clock, and the swarm of life poured into the building.

The employees are equally divided between the sexes. I never saw so many boys and girls in an Eastern manufactory. The working day is ten hours. Whenever the welcome bell proclaims the hour of noon , or six in the afternoon, these young people give a whoop like released schoolchildren, and can hardly wait to put away tools and make benches tidy before they join the merry throng streaming homeward.

The average earnings of the girls are something over six dollars per week-in a few cases as high as twelve; those of the boys and men three dollars per day. Board for girls costs about three dollars per week; for men, from five dollars upward. "That little girl," said the superintendent of the Steel Room to me, " can do any thing in this large department as well as any man in it;" and a number of similar cases were pointed out to me.

The Machine Shop-a hundred feet long, with thirty brawny, bare-armed workmen-is the letter A in the alphabet of the watch factory. Here all the tools and machines are manufactured and repaired. Their name is legion; their sizes are innumerable. They include machines which will take a shaving off a hair, and those which will slice up steel like apples; Elgin factory, punching wheelsregisters that will measure the twenty-five hundredth of an inch, and registers that will measure a foot; drills for making holes invisible to the naked eve, and drills almost as large as crowbars; and so on ad infinitum. I will not attempt to describe the "cams", "taps", "clamps", "quills", "reamers", "eccentrics", "chucks", and wigwags". The one thing a which strikes a novice is the wonderful accuracy and minuteness, the beautiful smoothness and polish of every thing. The finest jobs of ordinary machine-shops would be thrown aside here as utterly worthless.

The works of a watch, not counting the plates which form the shell or frame, are of brass and steel in nearly equal proportions. And,by-the-way, why is "brassy" a term of denunciation, and "as true as steel" the language of compliment, when brass may be made nearly as bard as steel, and will take almost as fine a temper? Steel is used in a watch wherever there is great strain upon some very slender part. But where there is much friction between two wheels one must be of brass and the other of steel. By some mysterious law of metals these will outlast two wheels of the hardest and most highly polished steel twice over.

Great sheets of brass and steel are first received in the Punching Room, where an enormous pair of shears cuts them into ribbons. These are lengthened and thinned between a pair of steel rollers, which, if required, will leave them only one-four-thousandth of an inch thick.

One of these ribbons is then passed slowly between the punch and die of a huge press, driven by a heavy wheel which a workman controls with his foot. The punch rises and falls with the motion of the wheel, coming down each time with a weight of twenty tons, and with a "click," cutting Out a perfect spoked wheel. The press is an enormous monster which bites out mouthfuls of steel but refuses to digest them. Like most monsters, however, it will do no damage if it is only fed. It leaves the wheels fast in the strip to be knocked out by hand. With it a man can cut out ten thousand wheels in a single day.

Next we visit the Plate Room. The upper and lower brass plates are respectively the roof and floor of the watch. The upper one must have thirty-one holes bored in it, for pillars, pivots, and screws. A little girl cuts them with a needle-like drill, which revolves like lightning, and goes through the thick plate in a twinkling. Another girl, with a chisel whirling with equal rapidity, cuts away the ragged burs or edges left on the side where the drill comes out. This "countersinking," which leaves a cuplike depression, is performed wherever a hole is drilled through brass, steel, or jewel.

The four pillars-the posts which are to bind roof and floor together are made and inserted in the lower plate by a miraculous little contrivance, which a coffee saucer would cover. The punching machine is a behemoth, but this is a fairy. it seizes one end of a brass wire, and in eleven seconds measures off a pillar, turns it down to the required size, makes a screw-thread in each end, cuts it off, and screws one end into the lower plate so firmly that we can not unscrew it with a pair of pincers.

But it keeps the workman's feet busy, and his hands flying as if he played a lively tune upon the piano. He will easily make and insert two thousand pillars in a day. By hand he could hardly make two dozen.

When the brass pieces are finished, all belonging to one watch are stamped with the same number and put into one of ten little boxes hollowed out in a board like birds'-nests. The nests have yet many journeys to make before the eggs are hatched; but the shell or frame is now ready for the works. The tipper plate is next engraved. Three men and four girls are kept busy tracing the elaborate scroll-work, and the inscription, "B. W. Raymond, Elgin, Illinois, No. 41,280," or "J. T. Ryerson, No. 41,290," as the case may be. The different grades made here are "Lady Elgin," "B. W. Raymond," "Mat Laflin," "G. M. Wheeler, " " H. Z. Culver," " H. H. Taylor," and "J. T. Ryerson;" but the numbering runs consecutively through all.

The screws in a watch number forty-four, or more than one-quarter Of all its pieces. The Screw and Steel Department is one of the largest in the factory. Its magical little automata, run by nimble-fingered girls, convert shining steel wire into infinitesimal screws, pare down their heads, and cut slots in them for microscopic screwdrivers. They are polished to perfect smoothness, and then, like every other part of the watch, brought to "spring temper"-the temper of the sword-blade-by beating, which leaves them of a rich, deep blue. The illustration shows the screws of their actual size, and also one magnified 100 times each way, or 10,000 times the actual size.

Here are machines which will cut screws with five hundred threads to the inch ; the finest used in the watch have two hundred and fifty. Even these threads are invisible to the naked eye, and it takes one hundred and forty-four thousand of the screws to weigh a pound. A pound of them is worth six pounds of pure gold. Lay one upon a piece of white paper, and it looks like the tiniest steel-filing. Only by placing it under a strong magnifier can we detect its threads and see that it is shining as a mirror, and as true and perfect as the driving wheel of a locomotive. Screws for the best compensation-balance are of gold. A ten-dollar piece will furnish material for six hundred and fifty of them.

The compensation balance comes from the Punching Room a solid piece of steel as large and heavy as a new penny, and inclosed in a rim of brass. It is ground down, worked out, and polished till it becomes a slender wheel the outer rim brass, the inner rim and crossbar steel-lighter and thinner than a finger-ring. Through the double rim twenty-two holes are drilled for the screws. A chuck whirls the wheel around-as one would spin a penny upon the table-four thousand eight hundred times a minute, while a lad makes each hole by applying three tiny drills one after the other. He will bore one hundred wheels per day, or apply a drill oftener than once in six seconds from morning till night-to say nothing of the time consumed in fastening on and taking off the wheels and sharpening his drills. Screws of gold or brass are then put in, and the balance is completed. On this little part alone nearly eighty operations have been performed.

Next we step into the Train Room, the largest and pleasantest in the factory. Seventy-five persons with busy fingers sit at six rows of benches extending its entire length, each before some little machine, shaping, smoothing, pointing, grinding wheels, pinions, or pivots. Cutting teeth in the wheels is done by piling up twenty or more, with an upright shaft passing through the centre of each, and turning a screw to hold them together. The girl in charge then lifts one handle of a little machine, and instantly a steel cutter like a shingle-nail, but with a sharp point at one end, is brought against them, whirling so fast that it looks like a perfect wheel. Whizzing down the outer edge of the pile, it cuts a groove or furrow in each wheel, When it reaches the bottom she moves the other handle; the cutter flies up to the top, and runs whizzing down again. A single wheel has from sixty to eighty teeth, but the girl will finish twelve hundred wheels a day. The long, hooked teeth of the scape-wheel, and the horn shaped tooth of the ratchet, are cut with equal facility.

In the Escapement and Jeweling departments we first encounter precious stones, in which pivots of brass or steel will run for generations without any perceptible wearing. In the order of hardness they stand, diamond, sapphire, white or milky ruby, red ruby, garnet, aqua marine. In jewk ' they are valued only for their color, in watch-making only for their hardness. Montana begins to supply garnets, but most precious stones come from India, Persia, or Brazil. They are always bought by the carat-theone-hundred-and-twentieth part of an ounce Troy-no matter how large the quantity. They are used not only for jeweling, but also for tools to cut other precious stones or hard metals with. Sapphire is the favorite, because it can be sharpened upon diamond, while a chisel of diamond -the hardest of all known substances -must either be broken to give it a fresh edge, or sharpened slowly and laboriously against another diamond.

The Dutch are the most famous lapidists in the world. They sent workmen from Amsterdam So London to cut the great Koh-i-noor. They will divide a diamond weighing but one carat into two hundred and fifty little slabs, which look like fairy finger-nails. Inserted in brass handles they become ridiculous little chisels, which might turn out wheels and axles for Queen Mab's chariot. Diamond dust also, as white as snow, and finer than flour, has a hundred uses in the factory. An ounce costs five hundred dollars. Metal edges for cutting and surfaces for polishing are "charged" with it; that is, a little of the powder is firmly imbedded in them, and gives them a sharpness which nothing can resist.

Some rare watches are jeweled with diamonds and sapphires, and many with rubies; but for all practical purposes garnets and aqua marines answer as well. The "Lady, Elgin," an exquisite little time-keeper, has fifteen jewels, all of ruby. Four of the fifteen in the " B. W. Raymond" are of ruby, the rest of aqua marine and garnet. The precious stones are cut into planks, and then into joists, by circular saws, and afterward broken into cubes. Then each is turned out in a lathe, exactly as a bed-post is turned in a furniture factory. By this time it weighs less than one- eighty-thousandth of a pound Troy. It is afterwad burnished into its setting-a little circular rim of brass. The hole is made through it with a diamond drill, barely visible to the naked eye, and polished with another wire which passes through it and whirls one way while the jewel whirls the other. The two make twenty eight thousand revolutions a minute. Finally jewel and setting are inserted in a little depression of the watch-plate, which they exactly fill, and held in place by tiny screws of steel, whose deep blue contrasts pleasantly with the bright gilding of the plate.

Every part of a watch must be absolutely accurate, but no part must fit perfectly. To run freely each pivot must have a little play, like a horse in harness; otherwise the least bit of dirt or expansion of metal would stop the delicate machinery. So every jewel-hole is left a little larger than the pivot which is to revolve in it for the "side-shake," and every shaft or axle a little short for the "end shake." The tiny gauges which measure all the parts make allowance for this-a bit of calculation which they perform with an ease and accuracy unknown to poor human brains.

There is another danger to guard against. If the least grain of diamond dust is left in a jewel-hole it will inbed itself firmly in the steel pivot, and then act as a chisel, cutting away the jewel every time the pivot revolves. The new dust of ruby or garnet which this produces will act in the same way" diamond cut diamond"-until the jewel is utterly ruined; so the utmost care is necessary to see that no particle of diamond dust remains in the watch. After the jeweling is done the birds'-nest boxes go to the Finishing Room. In following, let us stop to glance at the Dial Department.

The dial, a plain circular plate of Lake Superior copper,'no thicker than a silver three cent piece, is first covered with a paste of fine white enamel, carefully spread on with a knife, to the thickness of three-one-hundredths of an inch. After it dries a little, a workman with a long pair of tongs places the dial flat upon a red hot iron plate In the mouth of a glowing furnace,watching it closely and frequently turning it. The copper would melt but for the protecting enamel, and, at the end of a minute, when he takes it out it is as soft and plastic as molasses candy. The baking has "set" the enamel, but has left it rough, as if the dial face were marked with small-pox. After cooling it is ground smooth upon sandstone and emery, and then baked again.

Now it is ready for the painters. A girl draws six lines across its surface with a leadpencil guided by a ruler, making each point for the hours. Another with a pencil of black enamel traces coarsely the Roman letters from I to X11. A third finishes them at the ends to make them symmetrical. A fourth puts in the minute marks. Then the dial goes to an artist, who, holding it under a magnifier, paints the words "NATIONAL -WATCH co. " in black enamel with a fine camel's-bair brush. The inscription measures three-fourths of an inch from left to right, and less than one-ninetieth of an inch up and down ; but even then it is perfectly legible; and the swift, cunning fingers will paint it twice in five minutes.

"Is it not very trying to your eyes?" "If I were to do it all day, or even for an hour steadily," the painter replies, " they would ache terribly. But I put the inscription on two dozen dials, and then rest my sight by painting on the figures, lines, and dots."

"My father," observes the superintendent of the room, who is looking over his shoulder, " was an English dial painter. Once he traced the Lord's Prayer with one of these camel'shair brushes on asurface one-eighth of an inch long by one-ninth of an inch wide. Half the wing of a common bouse-fly would cover it. It a,qed the old gentleman's eyes twenty years for his work, but he could see objects at a distance just as well as ever." One can only wonder that it did not strike him blind.

In the Finishing Room we find a drawer full of mainsprings, coiled so loosely that each is as large as a breakfast saucer. One drawn out straight will be two feet long. It is polished like a mirror, and tempered to a beautiful deep blue. A girl coils one to the diameter of a thimble, and then, rifling one of the birds'nests, inserts the mainspring in its brass " barrel," the head of which is held in by a groove like the head of a flour-barrel. This circular chamber, only seven-tenths of an inch across, contains the whole power of the watch. One end of the mainspring is fast to the shaft which pnsses through it, and by which it is turned; the other, as it uncoils, carries around the barrel, and so communicates motion to the train. She puts the parts together temporarily, inserting only screws enough to keep them in place. Her flying fingers set up ninety watches and empty ninety birds' nests every day. The latter go back to the Plate Room for more eggs and fresh incubations; here at least there are always birds in last year's nests.

Hair-springs are made in the factory, of finest English steel, which comes upon spools like thread. To the naked eye it is as round as a hair, but under the microscope it becomes a flat steel ribbon. We insert this ribbon between the jaws of a fine gauge, and the dial-hand shows its diameter to be two twenty-five-hundredths of an inch. A hair plucked from a man's head measures three twenty-five-hundredths-one from the bead of a little girl at a neighboring bench two twenty-five-hundredths. Actually, however, the finest hair is twice as thick as the steel ribbon, for the hair compresses one-half between the metallic jaws of the gauge. A hair-spring weighs only one-fifteen-thousandth of a pound Troy. In a straight line it is a foot long. With a pair of tweezers we draw one out in spiral form until it is six inches long; but it springs back into place, not bent a particle from its true coiling. It must be exquisitely tempered, for it is to spring back and forth eighteen thousand times an hour, perhaps for several generations. A pound of steel in the bar may cost one dollar in hair-springs it is worth four thousand dollars.

After the watch has been run a few hours, to adjust the length of the hair-spring, it is "taken down," and all the brass pieces sent to the GildingRoom. There each part is polished for electro-gilding. Gold coin is first rolled out into sheets, and then dissolved with acids. At some stages it looks like nauseating medicine, but when it goes into the battery the solution is as colorless as spring-water. But it is a deadly poison. A girl in this room was kept at home for three weeks with sores upon her hand caused by dipping it in the liquid.

Twenty or thirty of the brass plates and wheels are hung by a copper wire' in the inner vessel or porous cell of a galvanic battery, filled with this solution, and the silent electric current deposits the gold evenly upon their surfaces. Ordinarily they are left in it about six minutes the quick, educated eye of the superintendent determines how long. A twenty dollar gold piece will furnish him with heavy gilding for six hundred watches, but he could make it gild four thousand so that they would look equally well on first coming out; or he could put five hundred dollars upon a single one-leaving the gold an inch thick all over the works-and it would look no better. All the pieces come out clothed in vellow, shining gold, and are sent back to the finishing Room, put together again, and then turned over to the "watchmakers"-the only persons in the factory necessarily familiar with all parts of the watch. A dozen sit in a row, in a very strong light, before a long bench strewn with their minute brushes, tweezers, magnifiers, and glass cases which cover small mountains of wheels and pinions. They insert the balance and hairspring, see that everything has been properly fitted, and put on the dial.

Then the watches, each in a little circular tin case, go in boxes of ten to the lynx-eyed Inspector, who scrutinizes every part for the slightest flaw or defect. Here is a box which has passed through his hands. Upon two watches are little slips of paper, one labeled "Fork strikes potance"-a slight but needless friction; the other, "Fix the number"-the figures upon some one piece being wrong or illegible. About one-third are thus sent back to the watchmakers, "after his rigid examination. The last scene of all is the adjusting. In his quiet little room the Adjuster keeps the Equator and the North Pole always on hand and ready for use in large or small quantities. First he runs the watch eight hours in a little box heated by a spirit-lamp to one hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit. Then he runs it eight hours in a refrigerator, where the temperature is nearly at zero. It must keep time exactly alike under these two conditions. If he finds any variation he changes the position of the screws in the compensation-balance, or substitutes new ones, first carefully weighing them in a pair of tiny scales of his own contriving.

When we ask him to show us the minutest weight they will indicate he places a bit of whisker upon one end, and adjusts the weight. The speck of hair weighs a trifle over the fiftyseven millionth of a pound Troy. The watch is next carefully adjusted to keep equal lime in different positions. Then it is ready for the case. Its different parts are composed of one hundred and fifty-six pieces. The old watch, made by hand, contained eight hundred pieces, if we count each link of its chain as a separate part. Reducing the number fourfifths has correspondingly reduced its intricacy, friction, and difficulties of repairing.

The proprietors realized from the outset that they could only succeed by making good timekeepers. To that one result all their energy has been directed. Manufacturing upon this large scale involves the use of so much capital that after a fine watch is finished and running they can not keep it a year for adjusting and regulating, as jewelers used to do under the old method. Most of their watches have gone out warm from the factory, but they have run with wonderful accuracy. The very first half dozen used upon the Pennsylvanin Railway were brought in by the engineers at the end of six days, and the greatest variation among them was eight seconds.

The railroad is the great critic. Nowhere else is a watch so severely tested; nowhere else is accuracy so absolutely essential. After careful trial, solely upon their own merits, the Elgin watches have been adopted as the standard upon several of our leading trunk lines. On the Pennsylvania Road alone more than a hundred locomotives are run by them, and they are in use among conductors and engineers upon every railway in the Northwest, and upon the great trans-continental line from Omaha to San Francisco. That is as it should be the Pacific Railway trains run by American watches.

Several months ago a Swiss imitation, labeled "Chicago Watch Company," began to appear in our markets. It looks well to unskilled eyes, but is so rough and cheap that the "movement" can be sold for five dollars after paying the import duty. And lately another imitation, bearing the same inscription, but manufactured in an Eastern factory, has made its appearance. Buyers who would be sure of avoiding these spurious watches should purchase only of some reputable and established jeweler, and never of unknown, irresponsible parties, however honeyed and seductive their advertisements. But this counterfeiting, both foreign and domestic. of an American product less than two years old, at least shows that the genuine article has won enviable reputation.

Two facts in the consumption of the Elgin watches are the shadows of coming events. First, fully half, thus far, have been sold in the East, and a large proportion of them in New England. Second, the Company are filling orders for India, which have come from London, without solicitation or advertising abroad. The prairies are beginning to manufacture for the Orient! What will this grow to in the near future, when three Pacific railways bring India, China, and Japan to our doors ?

The Company make "movements" alone, dealing with the public only through local jewelers, whom they leave to case each watch according to the customer's taste or fancy. Making cases-a business quite distinct from making watches-is done on a large scale by two or three houses in the United States, and on a small scale by a great many. Crystals cost the jeweler from two and a half to seventy-five cents apiece. The finest are made in Europe; cheaper ones in New York and Pittsburg. Gold cases cost from fifty to one hundred and fifty dollars each ; silver ones from six to thirty dollars; German silver about three dollars and fifty cents.

Thus we have followed the watch through its various stages until it is ready for the pocket. An expert jeweler working by hand might perhaps make a watch in three weeks. The Elgin factory, with less than four hundred and forty employees, turns out one hundred and twenty- five a day, or one every three days and a half for every worker in tile establishment, including all the young boys and girls, the book-keepers and clerks. As eighteen is to three and a half so is machinery to hand-work. In watchmaking alone, within the last fifteen years, American inventiveness has increased the efficiency of human labor more than fivefold.

Increase in product always brings a still larger increase in demand. When Denison conceived the daring project of manufacturing three thousand watches a year, his sober friends fancied that he could never find purchasers. Since then our imports have increased enormously. In 1868 we bought two hundred and fifty thousand watches, costing four millions of dollars, from Switzerland alone. About one fifth were gold; the rest silver. An enormous proportion were of the grades which sell without cases for from five to ten dollars each, and which as time-keepers are worth about the value of the powder it would take to blow them up. In addition to this foreign supply, one hundred thousand watches a year are now manufactured in the United States. Still the demand is so great that the Elgin factory is often two or three months behind its orders for the most popular grades. The same is doubtless true in other establishments. It will continue true in the time not far distant when a good watch in a silver case can be purchased any where for ten dollars, and when American factories are turning out a thousand watches a day, for the United States and Europe, and swarming Asia.

But no degree of familiarity can ever take the charm and interest from a great watch factory: It will always be a magician's palace, which makes the story,of Aladdin prosaic and commonplace.

Postscript:

The Elgin Watch Factory, which was at one time the largest watchmaking complex in the world, was demolished in 1966. A related factory, that of the Illinois Watch Case Company remains standing in Elgin, Illinois. The first Elgin movement, serial number 101, is enshrined in Elgin's Civic Center. The Elgin Historical Society also houses a collection of Elgin watches at it's museum at the Elgin Academy.