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Moseley and he became the factory’s first superintendent. The Seven Stars were all machinists first and watchmakers second. Since turn about is fair play, Elgin lost several of the Seven Stars to the Illinois Watch Co. The bait used was a $5,000 a year salary for 5 years, a $5,000 bonus and one acre of land on the company’s, soon to be acquired, 35 acre site (some things never seem to change). and seven of their key people where lured away to work for the newly formed company and they were nicknamed the Seven Stars. In September of 1864 a visit was made by some company representatives to the Waltham Watch Co. The incorporators were Philo Carpenter, Howard Z. The National Watch Company of Chicago, Illinois was incorporated on Augwith a capital of $100,000. While mechanical watches can’t compete with quartz watches for accuracy, there is something about having a watch that ticks that a quartz watch just can’t replace. Because Elgin produced so many watches and produced so many spare parts, they can still be easily bought and fixed, so even a 100 year old Elgin can be used, with care, on a daily basis. Today, collecting Elgin watches is quite popular. Gold Trimmed WatchElgin realized that there was a large market for good watches that could be sold and repaired relatively cheaply using factory made replacement parts that didn’t require hand adjusting.Įlgin never made the very highest quality watches in the world, nor did they make the very cheapest, but together with Waltham (aka The American Watch Company), they dominated the vast middle ground of the watch market. Up until around 1850, watches were made mostly by hand, which meant that if a part broke, you had to find someone with the tools and skill to make a new part.
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They kept that name until the late 1960s when they stopped producing watches and changed their name to the “Elgin National Industries”.Įlgin was founded on the idea of mass producing high quality pocket watches using machine made, interchangeable parts. The name never really stuck and in 1874, they changed their name to the “Elgin National Watch Company” because most of the watch trade and public were calling them “watches from Elgin”. Elgin produced their first wristwatch around 1910, leading most other American watch companies by many years.Įlgin was originally called the “National Watch Company”. The first watch Elgin made, an 18 sized B W Raymond railroad grade watch, was finished in 1867 and over the next 100 years, they went on to produce about 60 million watches. Noire, which takes place in post-World War II Los Angeles.Įlgin was founded in 1864, right as the civil war was coming to an end. The Steeleye Span album Bloody Men contains a track titled “Lord Elgin”: ostensibly a love song, it is, in fact, about the Lord Elgin Watch.Įlgin Watch Company is referenced in the video game L.A. Later, their accurate “wristlet” watches proved to be vital to the WWI war effort, helping to fuel a craze back in the states for something called “The Wrist Watch.” By the opulent Jazz Age, if you weren’t displaying the exuberant symmetry of an Elgin wrist watch or carrying a svelte, distinctive Elgin pocket watch, then who were you? Elgin had helped define the American pocket watch as unsurpassed in “Railroad Accuracy.” By 1930, the post Civil War dream factory imagined by a handful of American entrepreneurs had produced 32 million “time machines.” Elgin engineers built their own Observatory to maintain scientifically precise times in their watches. Raymond.” The watch was exquisite: Elgin National Watch Company was born.īy 1910, word of Elgin’s obsession with precision had spread around the world. After a year of designing and building the lathes and machines to achieve seemingly impossible levels of precision, a team of watchmakers and mechanical engineers produced their first pocket watch movement, named for mayor “B.W. Raymond, purchased an abandoned farm 30 miles north of Chicago and built a watch factory there. Harper’s magazine summed their sentiment perfectly: “It was the genuine, audacious, self-reliant Western spirit.” By August of that year this consortium, including then-Chicago mayor Benjamin W. In the spring of 1864 half a dozen ambitious Chicago businessmen decided that if Massachusetts could build a factory that built watches – Illinois could, too.