From workshop to factory: industrial watchmaking

For most of its history a watch was the work of many hands. In London, Geneva and the Jura, specialist workers made frames, wheels, springs, cases and dials, and a 'maker' — whose name appears on the dial — assembled, finished and sold the result. Industrialisation did not abolish this division of labour; it mechanised it.

Établissage

In the Swiss Jura, the system known as établissage organised the work of home-based specialists through merchant-assemblers (établisseurs). Raw movements (ébauches) came from specialist makers; finishing, escapements, cases and dials were contracted out. This flexible network made Switzerland a leading producer of watches by the nineteenth century.

Machines in Beaucourt

Frédéric Japy founded a factory at Beaucourt, near Montbéliard, in the 1770s, using machines of his own design to make ébauches in quantity. Japy became one of the great industrial names of French clock and watch production.

The American system

In Massachusetts, Aaron Lufkin Dennison and Edward Howard set out in 1850 to make watches with machine-made, interchangeable parts. Their company moved to Waltham in 1854 and, after several reorganisations, became the American Waltham Watch Company. Elgin, Hamilton and others followed. American factories produced accurate, affordable watches in very large numbers.

1876: the Swiss response

At the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876, Swiss observers were shocked by the quality and output of American factories. A report by Jacques David of Longines described the gap in detail and helped push Swiss firms towards integrated manufacture with machine tools, while keeping the strengths of the specialist network.

Railroad standards

In the United States, railway timekeeping became a matter of public safety. After serious accidents, notably a collision at Kipton, Ohio, in 1891, railroads adopted inspection systems and minimum standards for watches — organised by Webb C. Ball among others — that included open faces, lever setting, at least 17 jewels and adjustment to temperature and positions.

Interchangeable parts

The heart of the factory system was the gauge. Parts were made by machine to fixed dimensions, checked against gauges and kept in stock, so that a broken wheel or screw could be replaced without hand fitting. Automatic screw machines, wheel and pinion cutters and jewelling lathes reduced the work of skilled finishers. In Switzerland, Ernest Francillon brought production under one roof at the Longines factory in Saint-Imier in 1867, and in 1926 the main Swiss ébauche makers combined as Ébauches SA, later part of the ASUAG group founded in 1931.

Britain, Roskopf and the cheap watch

British watchmaking remained largely a hand trade in Prescot, Coventry and Clerkenwell. The Lancashire Watch Company, founded at Prescot in 1889 to adopt factory methods, closed in 1910. Meanwhile, Georges-Frédéric Roskopf's 'proletarian' watch of 1867, with a pin-lever escapement and few parts, showed that a working watch could be sold cheaply. Pin-lever watches by Ingersoll, Westclox and later Timex made watches affordable to almost everyone in the twentieth century, and in Japan Kintaro Hattori's Seikosha factory, founded in 1892, grew into one of the world's largest makers.