My Dad always told me it was a railroad watch, but I an not sure about that. It could tell you what day Easter was going to fall on 50 years from now. I have a silver pocket watch 2″x 2″. If you want the look of a golden pocket watch, without spending thousands, the Mudder Vintage Front Pocket Watch is the perfect choice. Then at the top end were the presentation watches. It’s been there for 200 years now. To fit in pockets, their shape evolved into the typical po… One of the areas that’s listed on the website is the forums, and that’s where the members get together to discuss watches and clocks. But they’ll pay a lot more money for a watch if you can prove that to them. Either 15 or 17 jewels are all you really need to make the watch operate effectively. Early pocket watches only had an hour hand as the minute hand did not appear on the clock face until the late 17th century. From the Jon Hanson collection. That’s a fuzzy reason, but it is the reason that there were a lot more hunting case watches in the second half of the 19th century. But for me, the case isn’t necessarily important because you can often find an authentic case. In the best watches, the jewels are rubies that have been shaped and pierced to make a little bearing surface out of them. I love my 86yr old elgin pocket watch, it was my great great granddads & I’m glad I’m able to keep it in the family. The people there are very helpful and would be happy to tell somebody what they have. It’s almost like the American League and the National League in baseball. At one time we had almost 40,000 people that belonged to our collectors’ association, and now we’re down around 20,000 people. I often collect authentic examples but not necessarily original examples, where some other people only collect original examples. Omega has been making coaxial escapement watches for about seven or eight years now. Thin tank watches became fashionable. Numbers only go up to 10. Tom McIntyre talks about antique pocket watches, discussing key manufacturers, the mechanics behind the watches, the varying types, and the collecting hobby in general. They’ll just move a short distance, and then they touch another bearing surface that they can spin on and it’ll keep them from losing any energy. photo credit: Pocket Watches Pocket Watch Styles Once they got to using the machinery, they could produce some very wonderful things. It just depends on where you drill the holes for your winding and setting keys. But Westclox did alarm clocks. They caught up with the Americans in the early 20th century and then passed them. I have quite a few more that are not on the website. The Fearless — the world’s first mass-produced watch. The Hamilton people bought one of the Swiss companies and then merged back into a Swiss company. changed all that, enabling watches to loose minute or two during one day. So Waltham is pretty much done. Introducing the pocket clock…. There’s the dial in front of you and you can see it, where if it’s a hunting case watch, when you pick it up to look at it, it’s metal on both sides. That was the second company that started up. Standard ladies’ watches are about an inch in diameter as opposed to about 2 inches in diameter for a man’s watch and correspondingly lighter. Face plate says American Watch Company. Recently a fellow started making watches in America, complete watches but on a very small scale, but that only started a couple of years ago. Inside the covers of the case will be trademarks and hallmarks and things like that, so good pictures of those are needed as well. I specialize in a few different specific types of pocket watches, but my principal interest is in the Waltham Watch Company, and even more specifically in the American Watch Co. products of the Waltham Watch Company. The McIntyre watches for example do not belong to me. In fact, a lot of people that are into watches and clocks are in it for the craft rather than for the collecting. If you bought it from the great-great-granddaughter of a U.S. senator that bought it originally in 1863, I’m reasonably sure that since that’s been sitting in the family vault for the last 85 years, it’s original. By 1865 American Watch Company could manufacture more than 50 thousand reliable watches, and The other one was a cobbled together effort of some 15 years ago, and it’s just not been able to keep up with our needs, so we just put a lot of effort into designing that. McIntyre: In Switzerland, Geneva is where the headquarters are, but the Le Locle is where the major part of production is. It’s called the Valle de Joux, which is the valley of joy, loosely translated, which is north and east of Geneva. It’s still a lot of fun if you have a small number of similar watches and you get a bunch of people to sit around the table to look at them and talk about them. That, plus a couple of wars where the Swiss didn’t fight and we did, essentially finished off the American watch industry. In 1505, a German locksmith by the name of Peter Henlein invented the world's first portable pocket-sized clock. On my website, the 1872 model American-grade watches are generally considered to be the very best of that technique. Somebody wanted to come in and make sewing machines, and so they threw out the watch people and gave the space to the sewing machine people. You have the gold gears and the steel shafts and the small gears, which are called pinions. If you want to identify an item, try posting it in our Show & Tell gallery. I’m one of the directors of the NAWCC. If you look at a gear train, you have a little gear and a larger gear, and the big gears are called wheels. So at the peak, I think there were 20 American watch companies. Is it possible that they were made in Ohio? Could you give me guidance wheee to find a serial number. It was just beginning to be developed. models of mainspring powered watches were round (often egg-shaped) and bulky, but the introduction of screws in 1550s enabled them to gain modern flatten The Springfield Armory built lots of rifles. A grade number is just the same as a name that describes a watch. Still today, there are expensive pens into the hundreds of dollars, and high end watches. Then you get into things that don’t make any sense to collectors like me. The first large-scale watch factories emerged in Waltham, Massachusetts — a natural birthplace as the area was the hotbed of the industrial revolution. It also has a very light design embedded on the front and back. If you can find a working Arnex pocket watch with a sweep second hand, you can expect to pay $25-35 for it. Watches get damaged, and the movement may or may not be worth repairing, and if it’s a lesser grade of movement, it might not get repaired, in which case somebody is offering the case for sale independently of the movement. RIVERSIDE MAXIMUS IN 14KT JOINTED CASE. In 1934, Ingersoll of London began marketing the watches in Great Britain with a different … It can be very confusing. fashion style was Charles II of England who popularized this new way of carrying watches across entire Europe and North America. It just says forums. McIntyre: There are some very rare watches that aren’t all that great. What should a wristwatch nerd know about American pocket watches and the industry that made them? Elgin called them either by a grade name or a grade number, and Hamilton always called theirs by grade numbers. They had an edge in terms of assembling the watches and adjusting them and that sort of thing. McIntyre: Try to focus on one company and one particular kind of watch if you’re just starting because there are just an awful lot of things that you need to know, and it’s easier to learn from one watch. So Waltham, Hamilton, Illionis, Elgin, and several other smaller companies all made the same watches. I have my grandfathers hunter style waltham 5293, sterling, with a sliver moon and star. Any knowledge would be appreciated, thanks, Patrick. Standard ladies’ watches are about an inch in diameter as opposed to about 2 inches in diameter for a man’s watch and correspondingly lighter. So that was the preferred way to make a watch for a very long time, and all watches were made that way until 1990 when George Daniels invented the coaxial escapement. This Swiss-made chronograph was first launched in 2006 and has been further improved. The open face style existed before that, and the hunting case style disappeared probably close to 1900. “The last American watch factory folded in the 1960s.”. McIntyre: A group on our website’s forums provides that service to people that log on and ask. The originator of this Thanking you for any information!! But the name was bought by a Japanese family who manufactures Waltham watches in Switzerland now, so there are Swiss Waltham watches that follow in the tradition of the original Waltham watches. It has extra jewels in the winding mechanism for the little gearing and that show you how much the watch is wound up. Turns out I was the one who wanted them so they was given to me after his passing in 2016. The Waltham 1872 models are not as rare as some of the other watches. The first ones were made by Waltham in 1860, and they made them in various sizes from that point on. The watches that met that specification were made by all the major American companies. As things tapered off in the 20th century with the Depression and so forth, Hamilton, Elgin, and Waltham were the last three survivors, and Hamilton was the final survivor of all of those. So there are four of them that are known, and there were probably eight produced, so there are four sleepers out there someplace. Another one was bought by a person in Wellesley, Mass. I was hoping you could tell my a little about my great, great grandfathers pocket watch . Then when you push the button, the lid pops up because there’s a little spring that makes it pop up. Those are about as good as the Waltham 1872 models. So you had Elgin and Illinois and Rockford were all pretty significant companies that were in the Chicago area, within 50 miles of Chicago. There are a handful of watches there that people have let me take pictures of to include to complete the story. Everything was made by hand before that. But a few years back, when the factory went out of business, their drawings and tooling and all of the materials got stored away in Chicago for quite a few years, then was sold to a watch collector here in the Massachusetts area. The pocket watch was also made available around the same time for the price of $1.50. We’re about to produce something like that for the association for Hamilton watches. With the open face watch, if you just pick it up and look at it, it’s just like a wristwatch. After that, you have to start putting extra jewels in the winding mechanism and other places where they don’t really do much good. What one wore for a watch, their fountain pen or other accessory, made much more of a statement then. was introduced, and pocket watches truly became the luxurious items that received many attention from fashion designers and innovators. The development of Ruhla’s first pocket started in the late 1880s and lasted for several years. A ballpoint, or rollerball pen well under five dollars works too. Longines wins the Grand Prix at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1900 with a pocket watch named La Renommée, containing the … In my opinion, from the late 1850s until just after WWII, the American watch industry produced more and probably better portable timekeeping machines than the rest of the world combined. of the watches that were made before 1750s was their lack of accuracy – they often loose several hours during one day! In the 18th century jewels were used as bearings and diamonds also became part of some pocket watches, making them very expensive. The 1894 bridge model was American Watch Co. grade, 12-size. Before pocket watches, we had the ‘pocket clock’. The center shaft turns so slowly that it’s probably not necessary to jewel that, but many people think it’s important. The Gruen Watch Company was in Ohio as well, but that was half Swiss and half American. The people that want those pay a lot of money for them. There was a brief period in the 1950s when some movements were made in the United States, and that will be mentioned shortly. In the 1930's there was a style change from highly engraved cases to smoother cleaner lines. Those are the flat pieces of metal that hold the gears between them. The first ones were made by Waltham in 1860, and they made them in various sizes from that point on. Made from a metal alloy, it’s considerably cheaper than a solid gold watch and it … I’ve thought about it but haven’t. Or atleast the hillman’s? Glo-Ben, the luminous The first American pocket watch was not made until 1809 by the American Watch Company in Waltham, Massachusetts, later known as the Waltham company. The majority of them were made in the 1970s and 1980s and are not valuable. Then we lived in Los Angeles for five years, and then we moved to Canada for two years, then West Virginia for nine years. We recall him telling us it was made of real gold. Collecting old pocket watches can be an extremely fun and rewarding hobby, but it can also be a bit frustrating at first … It’s much more attractive. One of the things NAWCC would like to do is make a global serial number database that you can type in the serial number. Disappointed with the poor quality of European watches that made their way across the Atlantic, demand for well-built pocket watches launched the American watchmaking revolution in the 1850s. That was the McIntyre Watch Company, and their standard watch is 25 jewels. But there’re 2,000 of the convertibles and there’re a couple of thousand of the ’72 models, so they’re not really super scarce like the McIntyre watch. shape that we know today. Only two fairly large companies, Howard and Waltham, were in Massachusetts. Then their are those of us appreciating old school craftsmanship. Talk about childish. Watch production spread to the rest of the world, gaining popularity rapidly. It keeps better time and uses less wear on the various moving parts, so it’s more reliable. Do you know anything about a watch like this. There was a company that only made a very few watches because they never really got in business. It’s partly a marketing gimmick. They’re arbitrary numbers. There were Westclox pocket watches, and those are still around but they’re made in South America now. This particular watch is often called the Henlein pocket watch because it was supposedly created by Peter Henlein in 1510. The New York Standard Watch Company was in New York, and they made cheaper watches but lots of them. For specific companies like the Waltham Watch Company, there’s a database that some friends and I put together that lets you look up information on all of the really old Walthams. Hamilton is really part of Swatch today, and legitimately so. They were always the two biggest. — Any ideas who makes this watch? The best way to identify a watch is to come to the discussion group at the NAWCC. Modern society more interested in functionality and pricing. Even though pages of history have forgotten about many watchmakers and innovators before him, modern scientific community has accepted that Peter Henlein, clockmaker from the Nuremberg, Germany, is the father of the modern clock and the originator of the entire clock making industry that we know today. McIntyre: Waltham produced a new model in each size and each class of watch. They made a handful of watches as prototypes and Fred tried to sell those to the jewelry stores and actually succeeded in taking orders for a lot of watches but the people that they were renting factory space from evicted them because they had a better tenant. If you were looking at a watch and it was running but was five minutes off, there’s a good chance you could get killed. Many people are fascinated by pocket watches, but are a bit intimidated by the thought of actually owning a miniaturized piece of complicated machinery made a hundred years ago [or more]. We have 170 groups around the world besides the association itself that actually collect the watches and clocks. By the time of World War I, pocket watches went out of fashion after highly miniaturized wrist watches became famous. The Illinois Watch Co. Stuart 5th Pinion movement. (All images in this article courtesy of Tom McIntyre). The only downside around the neck. That’s what we do at our local chapter meetings. I’ve gotten to know the family, the descendants of Fred McIntyre, and we think we are probably cousins but we don’t really know how. Any assistance you could give would be great. I ran out of room for clocks. Clocks first made the transition to wearable items sometime during the 15th century. After those, all the rest of the jewels are pivot jewels on a shaft that’s turning. W.J. So in the nicest watches, you see ruby jewels in gold settings set in nickel plates. Clocks have a lot of appeal because five people can sit around in a room and look at a clock. Model 1861 Fitt’s patent 10 size pocket watch case. That gives you 17 jewels – seven on the balance and escapement and 10 on the train. made. In the very beginning, they called it the full-plate watch and then the key-wind watch of 18-size, but later on, after they had more models than they could deal with that way, they started calling them by the model year. I’m giving a talk on the McIntyre Watch Company at the NAWCC national meeting in Grand Rapids here in a couple of months. Wheels and pinions are both gears, but they have different names. If you look at the activity on places like eBay, you see a lot of watches changing hands and a fairly large number of people doing that. I was trying to research this item for my mother but cant seem to find anything. The case has serial numbers but not the movement. It’s a little more difficult to share pocket watch collections, although if people are willing to photograph some and make web pages out of them, then they’re a lot easier to share. There’s another company which is the E. Howard Company, which is a very prominent company as well. I have a pocketwatch that has But the younger ones will always have a hard time staying with us because it’s really hard to spend as much time as it takes to really enjoy these things when you’re doing other things in your life. The Patek Philippe caliber 89, which is probably the most famous recent production, was made back in 1989 and cost $2.5 million, but it was a very special watch. The very best, most expensive Waltham watches for all of that roughly 50-year period, from 1859 until maybe 1915 or so, were always labeled American Watch Co. McIntyre: There were lots of reasons. This was the original name of the device that first emerged way back in 1462. The same is true of Hamilton. Has a circle with numbers going counter clockwise 10-100. Introduction of lever escapement 1462: My pocket watch > your pocket watch. Generally I look for a nice dial and a nice case, but on American watches, you can often find a case for the watch, so it’s not as critical to have the best grade case. Hello! McIntyre: A hunting case watch is one that has a closed cover over the dial so that you can’t see the dial when you’re holding the watch in your hand. All the companies made ladies’ watches, I believe. The Columbus Watch Company made a lot of very high-jeweled watches. I HAVE A POCKET WATCH GIVEN TO ME. Longines is associated with exploring for the first time, when it equips Prince Luigi Amedeo of Savoie, Duke of the Abruzzi, in his Arctic expedition. called the Goddards. Swiss watch sold by Fred McIntyre before he founded the McIntyre Watch Company. The ones that made the high-jeweled watches were the less prominent companies that were trying to compete with something special to try to gain market share. The American Watch Co. grade was introduced in 1859, and they made an American Watch Co. grade watch for the 20-size 1862 model, the 16-size 1860 model, the 16-size 1868 model, the ’72 model, the ’88 model and the ’99 model. For those that could afford them, a pocket clock was a symbol of wealth and watchmakers competed to … It looks exactly like the one on the top of the page with the fancy gold hands but it ha the Waltham name on it. 1899. History of the Pocket Watch. When my wife and I got married, we went to live in Spokane, Washington for a year. Styles changed in the 17th century and men began to wear watches in pockets instead of as pendants (the woman's watch remained a pendant into the 20th century). By Maribeth Keane Those seven jewels make a jeweled watch. So you need to know two different kinds of things in order to be able to deal effectively in them. soon after that other companies joined them in the manufacturing effort. This type of watch winds itself without requiring any special action by the wearer. This is said to have occurred in 1675 when Charles II of England introduced waistcoats. During the Depression in the ‘30s, lots of watches lost their cases. My grandparents were fairly prominent in the area, owning some businesses in town. Those pieces were invented in the 1770s and took over the industry long before manufactured watches. There’s a few ladies watches at the very top end, and they were made in relatively miniscule quantities. But of course, there are a lot more movements than there are cases because in times like today, when gold is at a very high price, the premium for having that gold made into a watch case is not all that high over the value of the gold itself. In terms of long-term value and the general collecting advice – this doesn’t apply just to watches; it applies to all collectibles – you should buy the very best you can afford to buy at any given time. You can think of the railroad watch as being a tool that somebody used in their job, whereas the bulk of the watches were for people to carry and use for their own pleasure or just to help them in their daily life. They were still making them by hand in Europe until then, and then a fellow from Switzerland came over to our centennial exposition in 1876 and saw the Waltham watches being made by machinery. If you averaged out those numbers, I guess that turns out to be close to a new watch for the men’s market every 10 years. The Swiss developed a very similar style of making watches by machine, but not with large factories like the Americans had. Wrist watches from this time period were not as reliable as pocket watches and easily ruined by rain or dirt. Different world today. Buy lots of books first and then buy some watches later.
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