Lonely Lion

The Elgin Clock at Union Station (from nsub1's flickr stream)

Chicago in the 19th century is well known as a meat packing city, as a railroad hub, and as a birthplace of the early labor movement.  Less well known is Chicago’s role in the history of time, both in the agreements of how time would be measured, as well as the watches that would do the measuring.  The clock at Union Station was built by the Elgin National Watch Company, founded in 1864 the company boasted B.W. Raymond, then mayor of Chicago, as an investor (possibly the reason that the city of Elgin ceded 30 acres of land to the enterprise). The watch company was started in Elgin, but was originally named “National Watch Company.”  It was called “The National Watch Company in Elgin” for a long time, and eventually renamed the “Elgin National Watch Company.”   The factory was modeled after large watch factories in the eastern U.S., factories that were quickly replacing watchmaking as a craft, and producing relatively inexpensive watches that could synchronize a nation spanning railroad network.

Before the railroads, every town would measure noon as the highest point the sun would reach in the day.  If they had a town clock, it would be set based on the position of the sun, not on an abstract idea of noon.  Given the pace of travel, ‘noon’ not aligning between distant towns wasn’t an issue.  With the railroads came coordination issues, noon needed to be the same within a reasonable distance.   A plan for time zones was created in Chicago in 1883, almost 20 years after the start of the Elgin Watch Company.

Watchmaking existed before the factories of the mid 19th century, but was a highly skilled craft.  A watchmaker could make 5 or so watches per year.  In his book, Watchmaking, George Daniels describes the revelation that even prior to full factory built watches, it was rare that a watchmaker would build each part of a watch on his own, “It became increasingly clear to me that it was not the practice for one man to make the whole watch by himself.  Over the centuries, it had become established that the simplest way to make watches was for the work to be divided into distinctive and entirely separate trades.”

In the 1869 Harpers article Making Watches by Machinery, the author tours the Elgin factory, and describes the modern watchmaking process.  Although on a large scale, each step of the process is similar to the process that Daniels describes – individuals making parts, but ultimately assembled by a skilled ‘watchmaker.’  Consolidating the work, and making standard parts were the real innovations in the factory.  At the time of the writing of the article, the factory was producing 125 watches per day, when the factory closed in 1964, Elgin had produced half of all the pocket watches ever made.

Elgin National Watch Company Factory, 1914