Waltham Watch Co.

Yes, like in Waltham, Massachusetts!

Waltham, Mass. was the home of two of the first mass-produced watch companies in the world. The factory buildings are still there - on Crescent Street along the south side of the river right off Main Street. E. Howard built his company there and later, the more prolific Waltham Watch Co. opened just about across the street. Waltham Watch manufactured watches there from 1854 until the factory closed in 1957 - a casualty of World War II. The company could offer reliable, quality watches in all qualities to suit everyone - from a farmer for his Sunday best to a railroad magnate.

By the late 1860s, Waltham was producing a very popular and reliable watch movement that could be cased in anything from an inexpensive silverplated case to an 18K case gold in large quantities. The Swiss and English were the major watch manufacturers of the day and each watch was pretty much made by hand. Apparently in the early 1870s, Swiss exporters noticed that shipments to the Americas had virtually stopped, so they sent someone over to investigate. At an industrial exhibition in Philadelphia, Waltham was there promoting their watches and brought a machine that made screws for the watches. The machine took a piece of steel wire in one end and spat out hundreds of perfect screws from the other end. Before this, each screw was hand-threaded to fit the hand-threaded piece it screwed in to. This "researcher", (OK, industrial spy) was floored and immediately returned to relate what he saw. It took the Swiss twenty years to catch up, and only then with the help of American machine shops who supplied them with the necessary tools and dies.

The downfall of the company was two-fold. They were a little slow to accept the popularity of the wristwatch introduced by the Swiss in the early 1920s and when they finally started to ramp up production of their wristwatches, the Depression didn't offer them much of a market for their wristwatches. The second was much more out of their hands. Due to the fact they made such quality timepieces, they were virtually forced by the War Department to convert the factory over to producing war-related products (fuse timers, war watches, etc.) during World War II. The Swiss, in the meantime, were able to spend those years developing and perfecting the automatic-wind wristwatch introduced in the late 1930s and the shockproof balance jewel. Waltham started to retool after the war but were never again a major player. The company factory basically closed in about 1957. The Waltham name is still being put on the dials of cheap watches today, a true slap in the face to the quality workers who made the Waltham name synonymous with high quality, reliable, technical marvels - over 140 years ago!