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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 March 2009
This article examines the productivity of American watch manufacturing technology between 1850 and 1900 as representative of the industries collectively known as the American System of Manufactures. It then compares and contrasts products and responses to market events in British and American horology in the nineteenth century. Finally it weighs factor-substitution models which purport to explain the sharply different British and American responses to mechanization, specifically why the American System of Manufactures is indeed American.
1 Screws were used to secure the top plate to the pillar plate, hold jewels in place, poise the balance wheel, and secure various parts such as the winding wheels, click escapement lever bridge, and so forth.
2 Marsh, Edward A., The Evolution of Automatic Machinery, as Applied to the Manufacture of Watches at Waltham, Mass., by the American Waltham Watch Company (Chicago, 1896), p. 95.Google Scholar
3 Hoke, Donald R., “Ingenious Yankees, The Rise of the American System of Manufactures in the Private Sector” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1984), chap. 5. A revised version of this chapter will appear in October 1987 in the catalogue of American watches published by The Time Museum of Rockford, Illinois.Google Scholar
4 Battison, Edwin to Hoke, Donald, May 30, 1986. The author subsequently discussed the Vander Woerd machine with Battison and a representative of the Waltham Screw Company.Google Scholar
5 Marsh, Automatic Machinery, p. 100.Google Scholar
6 U.S. Patent No. 329,182, Marsh, Edward A., “Screw Machine,” October. 27, 1885.Google Scholar
7 The 1854 figure is from Moore, Charles W., Timing a Century: History of the Waltham Watch Company, (Cambridge, Mass., 1945),CrossRefGoogle Scholar and the 1907 figure is from Marsh, Edward A., The Original American Watch Plant; Its Planting, Growth, Development and Fruit. (Waltham, 1909), p. 21.Google Scholar
8 Hoke, “Ingenious Yankees,” chap. 3.Google Scholar
9 Jerome, Chauncey, History of the American Clock Business For The Past Sixty Years And Life Of Chauncey Jerome Written By Himself (New Haven, 1860).Google Scholar One convincing indication of how well these clocks sold in England lies in their “reexport” back to the United States in the 1960s and 1970s for their antique value. I myself have seen them stacked like cord wood by the hundreds in American warehouses.
10 The exception is marine chronometers.Google Scholar
11 Essentially, the factor-substitution model “industry” consists of variations on the theme that “everyone reacts to relative prices,” beginning with Habakkuk, H. J., American and British Technology in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1962).Google Scholar
12 There are a series of questionable assumptions built into factor-substitution models. For example, the assumption that producers choose from an array of techniques and materials based on relative prices ignores the technological imperative of many products. If you are going to make portable timekeepers with oscillating balance wheels in 1860, you must use tempered steel hairsprings. There is no substitute, regardless of price. Producers' choices are sharply limited by the nature of the product itself, relative prices notwithstanding.Google Scholar
13 This article only offers data inconsistent with factor-substitution theory. There are many aspects of this debate still unsettled. Strictly speaking, for example, factor-substitution models refer to alternative methods for making identical products. Handmade English clocks were of higher quality than machine-made American clocks and thus were different products. Jerome's success proves either that consumers were prepared to treat the two types of clocks as substitutes when offered so considerable a price incentive or that Jerome sold in a segment of the market the British makers ignored.Google Scholar
14 original title of this paper included the analogy of Ptolemaic astronomy. The point was that factor-substitution models are twentieth-century versions of Ptolemy's astronomy, which described an earth-centered universe around which the stars and plants traveled in concentric circles. Ptolemy's theory correctly predicted the paths of the heavenly bodies within the limits of scientific observation and mathematical computation of his time. It was an immense intellectual achievement—it simply had no relation to the physical reality of the universe. The invention of the telescope vastly improved scientists' power of observation. They quickly concluded that their new data did not fit the Ptolemy's theory and they soon abandoned it.Google Scholar
15 Marsh, The Original American Watch Plant, p. 4.Google Scholar
16 Eggleston, Edward, “Among the Elgin Watchmakers,” Scribner's Monthly, 5 (04. 1873), pp. 785–91,Google Scholar reprinted in the Bulletin of the N.A.W.C.C., Inc., 19 (February. 1977), pp. 140–45.Google Scholar