Edward A. Marsh, the unofficial historian of Waltham, reflected, in this booklet, published in 1916, on the social development at Waltham over the previous 66 years. His focus was mainly on the social support system and its effect in avoiding the "ferment of unionization" that was then gripping the nation.
While his thoughts are the primary inspiration for this talk they have been blended with my own musings about the development at Waltham.
Since this is an after dinner address, there is no claim to scholarship. I would like to share some of my thoughts about these early days of the development of American industry.
Beginnings
The presentations of the last two days have made abundantly clear the brilliant contributions of many people to the development of machine production of watches. I would like to look at some of the concepts and forces that were put in play as part of this process.
Aaron Dennison was a man with deep convictions about the relationship of workers to the enterprise and the general responsibilities of citizens to the community as a whole. He was raised as a Swedenborgian, a religious group that views all persons as equal before God and with equal responsibilities to society. These views led other Swedenborgians to found utopian communities and to go on heroic quests to benefit mankind. One of the best known is John Chapman, of Leominster Massachusetts, popularly known as "Johnny Appleseed."
Aaron Dennison was not dreaming of the prosperous business that was enough to content his friend Edward Howard. If that had been his goal he would have contented himself with a larger role in the family's jewelry box business. Dennison wanted to make a major impact on the world with the concept of the interchangeable part, machine made watch. What is more Dennison felt the watch had to make a unique statement about what could be done with machinery. His early attempts to design a machine produced 8-day watch was the expression of that desire.
When Dennison came to understand that he was not technically capable of realizing his dream of an 8-day watch he employed the Marsh brothers to develop the actual working model. The agreement was that they could keep the first two watches they built if they could come up with a working design. This was the beginning of an interesting practice at Waltham that spread broadly into the general culture of the company. Employees were encouraged to purchase discounted material from the production of watches and use that material to produce unique pieces with their own concepts of design or finish.
Dennison also had the good judgment to bring in his immensely talented former employee Nelson Stratton to salvage the material from his failed attempt to produce the 8-day watch and develop the design of the 30-hour watch that, with improvements over time, became the mainstay of the company for the next 20 years.
In his unpublished history of the American Watch Co. William Keith (Waltham's first president) laments the foolishness of Dennison in pursuing dreams instead of reality and his inability to complete things he began. I think this is an unfair judgment. Dennison had the "high vision" and was right about the need to produce unique products in terms of quality and design. He also had the stature to inspire the employees to work in the face of very uncertain times.
The failure of the company in 1857 had as much to do with the general economic climate of the time as it did with any management failings on the part of Howard and Dennison. However, neither of them could match the mercantile genius that R. E. Robbins brought to the enterprise.
R. E. Robbins' stress on the low cost high volume items generated the income for the company, but the unique designs inspired originally by Dennison and later by his protégé Stratton made the name of the company and provided the milieu in which the high volume products thrived. Of course, a major testament to the mercantile genius of Robbins is that he recognized the value of what Dennison envisioned and supported its execution for the duration of his control of the company.
Intellectual Freedom
Dennison's vision was not without risks. If management encourages the workers to think for themselves, they may think to leave.
It is likely that Stratton and his bright young engineers Woerd and Moseley chafed at the slow pace of engineering change that Robbins felt the business could afford. In the midst of this growing discontent, Dennison was encouraging Stratton to give expression to his ideas with the new 3/4 plate design. Stratton went all the way with designs for complex escapements and the use of isochronous helical hairsprings. These things did not sit well with management and Dennison as the responsible Superintendent eventually bore the brunt of the blame.
In the midst of this ferment, Belding Dart Bingham of Nashua, New Hampshire showed up at Waltham to purportedly learn the business of machine made watches and contribute his substantial talents to the enterprise. He brought his precocious son along to share the learning experience.
In fact Bingham had the backing of Noyce and other prominent Nashuans to recruit talent to establish a watch manufacturing plant in Nashua. The deal that was struck with the talented people of Waltham was that they would be able to give free rein to their dreams of making a truly great watch by automatic machinery.
The key problem was not the design of the watch itself, but rather the design of machinery capable of producing it. This is the task that Charles Moseley and Charles Vander Woerd set out to solve.
Unfortunately, as was often the case, the money ran out before the dream was realized. It may still have been possible to trim back operations and eventually realize the dream, but the competition of the war and the need for skilled hands at the Springfield Armory also contributed to the failure of the operation.
Another tribute to the genius of Robbins is that he recognized the value of what had been accomplished in Nashua and sent his best operative Fogg, to evaluate the results and recommend a course of action. Fogg was a good and true engineer and reported back that the work was sound and with little effort could be brought into full scale production.
The final result after a few years of work both in Nashua and Waltham was the development of the Nashua department and the re-integration of many of the disaffected employees who had joined the short lived adventure.
Dennison had been discharged at least partly because of the Nashua incident and Stratton was no longer to be trusted with the operation of the plant. Bacon became the General Superintendent. Fogg took charge of the main production and Vander Woerd was given charge of the new Nashua Department. Within a few years, Bacon retired and Vander Woerd became the General Superintendent and the American Watch Company entered its golden years.
The story of these people is interesting but incomplete. We don't really know the story of Ezra C. Fitch, but it is clear that he must have been a major force in the operations of the company.
Fitch had been with Robbins & Appleton from the earliest days and was a leading sales person for the American Watch Co. line. Fitch was much more than a drummer. He contributed the invention of a clever setting mechanism in the early 1870's and in 1879 he patented the dustproof case design that would become the mainstay of working men's watches for years to come.
He was brought "inside" in 1874 to finally take management of the plant completely away from the engineers and put it in the hands of a man with business background. The loss of Charles Vander Woerd was an unfortunate, but necessary result of this action. In 1883 at the end of the period we have explored with our Seminar, he became the President of Waltham and held that post until 1921. It seems that Ezra C. Fitch is the one individual in the entire story that was able to hold the entire image of the organization from technology, to sales, to general management in his mind at one time
Social Safety Net
Part of Dennison's utopian dream was that all the workers would be provided for in every need. He was especially sensitive to the needs of the women employed in the factory because his sisters were the mainstay of his family's box making business.
In the mid 19th century young women away from home were a difficult concept. They had to be protected and cared for. Many of the women who worked at Waltham actually did live at home with their parents. But, a significant number lived independently in the town of Waltham. The plant was operated on the "Waltham System" that had been developed in Waltham by the original mill operators The Boston Manufacturing Co. (The original mill is the site of the Charles River Museum of Science and Industry.) The American Watch Co. continued the development of the Waltham System to provide comprehensive benefits to the
employees that were equal or greater than those provided in modern industrial plants.
The watch company built Adams house as a place where young ladies could live a proper life while working at the watch factory as skilled assembly workers. Adams house could not provide housing for all the "girls" but it could provide an example and an economic benchmark for other boarding facilities in Waltham that housed the remainder.
The company recognized early on that healthy workers were productive workers. Waltham provided both male and female nursing stations in the factory with skilled nurses to serve the employees.
The company also maintained a number of beds in the Waltham Hospital exclusively for the use of Waltham employees at no charge to the employees. These facilities were truly ground breaking and continued the theme of the family of Waltham.
The factory also provided a cafeteria for about 150 to 200 women employees. It is interesting that the facilities were
segregated. The women were obviously considered to be the equal of their male fellows in their skills, but women still required special treatment in 19th century America.
This was still the 19th century and women had no future in management or supervision, so the girls of Waltham mostly earned their dowry and returned home or found romance among the abundance of fellow male employees. Many of the resulting families provided several generations of employees to the factory.
The Intellectual Factory
I would like you to think with me for a moment about what was unique in Waltham.
Until that time there were factories and there were skilled trades, but no one had organized a massive group of skilled trades into a factory operation. Certainly nothing approaching the scale of Waltham.
The challenge of providing a rich environment while coordinating the work of so many independent talents was remarkable. The key was the assembly team. Workers at Waltham were organized as groups of skilled workers with a variety of skills. A team of super assembly girls could bid for the services of a master adjuster and springer and improve the income of all of them. These relationships were not only allowed, but also encouraged.
In addition to the incentives built into piecework compensation for assembly workers, Waltham provided key employees the opportunity to purchase shares in the company and participate in the overall success of the operation
The piecework system 
was not without its pitfalls. The group of supervisors met regularly and tried to coordinate their operations, but any pure piecework system risks the danger of unbalanced
production. When real
inventory controls were finally installed at Waltham in the 1890's they discovered that some departments had produced enough material that other departments would need to work 5 years or more to catch up and bring the stock into balance. These painful discoveries transpired
just when the rise of the mid-western competition was bringing ultimate price pressure on the sales of watches.
Economic Pressure
When Elgin first spun off from Waltham, they were too far away to cause much concern. When the two companies did butt heads, they agreed to compromise on the new safety pinion idea and let both Burt's patent and Fogg's patent merge into the "Patent Safety Pinion." The agreement on the safety pinion extended to essentially all patent improvements developed by either company. They agreed to either freely share or license at reasonable terms anything either company developed.
This agreement would not likely stand the scrutiny of modern anti-trust investigators, and eventually led to problems in the early 20th Century. However, it was a brilliant compromise for at least 40 years.
The success of Waltham and Elgin was too much for the American capitalists to ignore. There was a continuous flow of capital into new watch companies and some of these eventually became successful. The ever-increasing flow of watches from these new companies eventually led to a glut of American watches on the market.
The answer to the over-abundance was the formation of broader cartels than the cozy arrangement between Elgin and Waltham. Eventually, these cartels attracted the attention of the trustbusters and the industry began its long contraction. Were it not for the world wars that followed, the American watch industry might have survived healthy after a bit of blood letting.
The Swiss with their freedom from the strains of a war effort were able to enter the market with good new products after the First World War and establish a base from which to grow with overwhelming strength after the Second World War.
Although they lasted a few more years, Elgin and Waltham did not stand much of a chance. They had too much stuff left over from their long history. Hamilton did much better and in reality survived the Swiss invasion. They failed like the Swiss did with the advent of the quartz age. They survive like the Swiss do with large multinational operations such as SMH.
It will be difficult for Americans to compete with the Swiss and English craftsmen for the renaissance of individual craft watchmaking, but they may and there are signs that the phenomenon of the successful craft made watch that was resurrected by George Daniels will find expression in the works of young new Americans continuing the dream of the Nashua rebels.
Death by Efficiency
It is not entirely clear that it was the competition of the Swiss that sounded the death knell for the American watch companies. At Waltham at least there was the pernicious invasion of the efficiency experts.
Imagine the happy family struggling to survive on the banks of the Charles with everyone doing their best to build a watch that the world would and could buy. The scientists arrive and recommend that the work would proceed much better if it could be planned properly. They had great ammunition in the 40-year-old anecdotes about rooms full of plates with no wheels to go between them.
The well oiled teams of workers that worked together to support each other on bad days and bring the best result they could for the team, were now subjected to arbitrary production goals on an individual basis and grouped together into teams too large to really know one another or understand the skills required for each others work. The family was lost and it became each man or woman for himself or herself.
The destruction of the morale (the depression did not help) eventually led to the unthinkable. Waltham became unionized. My dear friend and one of the early organizers at Waltham, Pat Caruso, hated the whole concept. The thought that the union might decide how much he could produce in a period of time or what the quality of his work might be was almost more than he could bear. However, the alternative of having management divide the workforce into competitive teams that competitively set goals for one another was an even more abhorrent alternative. Pat, with much reluctance, went for the union. His loyalty to the factory was such that he could never really bring himself to blame management. It was always "the stockholders made Dumaine do it."
Pat loved to tell the story of being given the assignment of adjusting a 23 jewel Vanguard in "standard time." His rate would be taken as the base rate for employees adjusting the watch and the piece rate would be calculated from that rate. He practiced on a couple of watches and then undertook the timed operations. He was able to bring 6 watches to initial time in one day and management was delighted at the level of production.
When the watch went to piece work, Pat actually adjusted 10 watches the first day he was working on them and quickly got to where he could do a first class job on 15.
When the efficiency experts asked him how it was possible that he was that much more efficient, he said it is simple enough. If you pay me to go to the corner and get you a newspaper I will walk to the corner, get it for you and bring it back. If you offer me ten cents for every paper I can bring you from the corner, I will run to the corner and carry as many as I can back to you. The moral was clear. Pat was an old time watchmaker and the secret was giving him a piece of the action.