Thoughts on early wristwatches and how I became a collector.

The history of wristwatches is still very much being written and that is especially true of my topic, the early American wristwatches, because, frankly, there is a lot that we don’t know. Some of what I’m going to tell you this evening you have probably heard before or at least you’ve seen it written before, but I’m also going to challenge some of the conventional wisdom that’s been written about these wristwatches. I speak for all the presenters here, I think, when I say that nobody has all the facts or all the answers.

We have some of the facts; we can say, for example, that Hamilton produced so many of a certain model because we have the original production records from the factory. But other statements we make about why a certain thing happened, or how a certain thing happened in the evolution of wristwatches, are conjecture on our part or speculation based on the evidence at hand, evidence that is often incomplete.

We tend to accept so-called facts about wristwatches as gospel truth, especially when they’re written down. I don’t know what it is about the written word but when we see it, we think it’s true. All of us as students of horology should continually question the information that we receive and try to find evidence that either supports or refutes it. It would be a sad day indeed for all of us if we reached the point that there was nothing left to learn about wristwatches. Because for us, the people who poke around libraries and poke around company records and piles of old books and catalogs that we see at the watch shows, the thrill is always the hunt. Or to put it another way, what we enjoy most is the journey, not necessarily getting there.

People often ask me how I got started collecting watches and this does bear a little bit on the topic tonight. The year was 1986. I had graduated the year before from UW Madison with a degree in journalism. I was a hotshot journalist, or so I thought, working for one of Madison’s two daily newspapers and I was perhaps a little more fashion conscious than I am today. I was like many people of my age, which was around 30 at that time, reading magazines like Esquire and GQ and others of that kind, and I noticed something in the wristwatches called the “retro look.”

The retro look was suddenly the rage. Companies like Bulova, Hamilton, and Gruen were coming out with their old models again or had revamped them, and I was intrigued. I went to a couple of jewelry stores to look at them and I was shocked at the prices. They were very expensive. The cases were electroplated; they were not gold filled like the old ones were and, of course, most of them were fitted with quartz movements, and I thought to myself, if I’m going to get an old-looking wristwatch, why don’t I just get an old wristwatch? So I started hanging out at flea markets and I finally found one that I liked and, of course, as most of you know, one is never enough. If one is good, then 10 are better and certainly 20 are even better than that.

One thing led to another and this budding collector suddenly had a lot of duplicates and spares on his hands, so I started doing a little trading and I began making up paper catalogs of my inventory and mailing them to my customers. Now this was 15 years ago, but it seems like ages ago when I would lay my watches down on a copy machine and make copies of them, then cut out the little pictures with scissors, glue them down on a master and then go out to the copy shop and run off a couple hundred copies and mail them out. How far we have come since then. My catalog is now totally digitized and it’s on the web. We just don’t seem to use paper the way we did, although it’s still certainly a part of researching watches.

I love all kinds of watches;  each style of manufacture to me has a fascinating story behind it. Around 1990 I decided to employ my journalism skills a little bit and began writing about watches and that has just fueled the fire. The more I write, the more I research, the more types of watches I become interested in. I do hold a special place in my heart for the earliest American wristwatches, for reasons that I will get into in just a little while.

Figure 1, above. Early watchbands. Figure 2, below. An early lug-style watchband.

Roots of American Wristwatches

My subject covers a period of roughly 30 years, from about 1900 to 1930, and is confined to American wristwatches made by five companies: Waltham, Elgin, Hamilton, Illinois, and Hampden. Certainly you can find other names on the earliest American wristwatches that were manufactured, but these five companies  were clearly the dominant players.

When we talk about the earliest American wristwatches we are really talking about pocket watches because that’s what they were. They were small, typically 12-size and under, pocket watches that were converted by various means into watches that were worn around the wrist. This could be accomplished in one of two ways. The first was with leather bands that were specifically made to house those pocket watches. Figure 1 shows two of the earliest ones; the one on the bottom was made in 1910 and was marketed to nurses and to sportsmen so that they could have easy access to a timepiece and not have to have a pocket watch in their pocket. The band on the top is known as the duo and was patented in 1911 by Charles A. Meeley of Baltimore.

The other way to convert a pocket watch into a wristwatch, which fortunately for fashion’s sake became more popular, was to take a pocket watch movement and dial and place them into a small pocket watch or pendant style case with wire hand-soldered to either end of it. Then a leather or canvas band would be looped through the wire lugs. Here you have the beginning of the modern wristwatch, which as you can see in Figure 2 has not varied substantially in the last 100 years.

When did we actually start seeing wristwatches bearing the names of the American manufacturers that I just mentioned? American case makers appear to have begun making cases to house men’s wristwatches starting in about 1910. Among these case makers were companies like Fahy’s of Sag Harbor, New York; the Wadsworth Case Company of Newport, Kentucky; and the Keystone Watch Case Company of Philadelphia. There were others, but the ones I mentioned were certainly the major players at the time. They began making cases, following the lead set by European case makers sometime earlier.

I want to talk a little about the time gap between the appearance of wristwatches in Europe and the appearance of wristwatches in the United States. It’s not as much of a time gap as originally thought and as has been written of in the past. Several writers, including myself, have written that wristwatches appeared in Europe as early as the late 1880s. This is based on a claim by Girard Perregaux. You’ve read that they made watches for the German navy as early as the late 1880s. David Penney has done quite a bit of research on this statement and can find little or no evidence that Girard Perregaux  made wristwatches for the military or anybody else as early as that time. In fact, Mr. Penney states that he finds no evidence that wristwatches appeared in Europe much before 1900. So it appears that the U.S. did lag behind  Europe in the appearance of wristwatches, but not by 20 or 25 years as was once thought, but more likely by about 10 years.

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