The Auburndale Watch Company E-Book

Edwin A. Battison

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 56

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

THE AUBURNDALE WATCH COMPANY - First American attempt toward the Dollar Watch An interesting part of the watchmaking industry - a well-intentioned endeavor gone wrong. Nevertheless, or exactly because of that, those rare timepieces still around on the market today fetch high prices amongst collectors. Completely re-typed, clearly readable text - no photographic reproduction. Re-arranged layout; all original black-and-white images have been kept. The life of the pioneer has always been arduous. Not all succeeded, and many disappeared, leaving no trace on the pages of history. Here, a painstaking search has uncovered enough of the record to permit us to review the errors of design and manufacture that brought failure to the first attempt to produce a really cheap pocket watch. Published in: CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE MUSEUMOF HISTORY AND TECHOLOGY, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM, Bulletin 218, paper 4, pages 49-68, from 1959, SMITHONIAN INSTITUTION, Washington, D.C., by Edwin A. Battison, associate curator of mechanical and civil engineering, Museum of History and Technology, at the Smithsonian Institution's United States National Museum

Leseprobe

CONTENT

INTRODUCTION

THE INVENTION

DEVELOPING THE IDEA

THE NEW SPONSOR

SUCCESS AND FAILURE

THE LESSON

Note: Some spelling/punctuation mistakes or printing errors in the original work have been corrected, which means minor and insignificant changes from the original text. Other possible issues were mostly left unchanged.

Endnotes have been left at the end of the book, as they mostly are too large to be directly inserted into the text or shown as footnotes at the individual pages.

Efforts have been made to improve images and drawings available from the original source. This was, however, only possible to a limited extent; the reader is therefore kindly asked to accept an occasional lower printing quality. The overall layout has been optimized for a print book and the e-book version.

INTRODUCTION

The life of the pioneer has always been arduous. Not all succeeded, and many disappeared, leaving no trace on the pages of history. Here, a painstaking search has uncovered enough of the record to permit us to review the errors of design and manufacture that brought failure to the first attempt to produce a really cheap pocket watch.

This paper is based on a study of the patent model of the Auburndale rotary and other products of the company in the collections of the National Museum, and of other collections, including that of the author. The study comprises part of the background research for the hall of timekeeping in the Museum of History and Technology.

The Author: Edwin A. Battison is associate curator of mechanical and civil engineering, Museum of History and Technology, at the Smithsonian Institution’s United States National Museum.

The idea of a machine-made watch with interchangeable parts had been in the minds of many men for a long time. Several attempts had been made to translate this conception into a reality. Success crowned the efforts of those working near Boston, Massachusetts, in the 1850s. The work done there formed the basis on which American watch making grew to such a point that by the 1870s watches of domestic manufacture had captured nearly all the home market and were reaching out and capturing foreign markets as well. In spite of this great achievement, there remained a large untapped potential market for a watch which would combine the virtues of close time keeping and a lower selling price. Only a radical departure in design could achieve this. Rivalry between the several existing companies had already produced an irreducible minimum price on watches of conventional design.

The great obstacle to close rate in a modestly priced watch is the balance wheel. This wheel requires careful adjustment for temperature error and for poise. Of these two disturbing factors, poise is the most annoying to the owner because lack of it makes the watch a very erratic timekeeper. A watch in which the parts are not poised is subject to a different rate for every position it is placed in. This position error, as it is called, can and often does cause a most erratic and unpredictable rate. Abraham-Louis Breguet, the celebrated Swiss-French horologist of Paris, is credited with the invention, in 1801 [endnote 1], of his tourbillon, a clever way to circumvent this error.

Figure 1 – Breguet’S Tourbillon. At C is shown the carriage which revolves with pinion B carrying the escapement and balance around the stationary wheel G. (After G. A. Baillie, Watches, their history, decoration, and mechanism, London, Methuen, n.d.)

His solution was to mount the escapement in a frame or 'chariot' which revolved, usually once a minute, so that with each revolution all possible positions were passed through (Figure 1). This gave the watch an average rate which was constant except for variations within the period of revolution of the chariot. Only a very skillful workman could, however, work with the delicacy necessary to produce such a mechanism. The result was that few were made, and these were so expensive that it continued to be more practical to poise the parts in a conventional movement. The idea of revolving the entire train of a watch, including the escapement, seems to have evolved surprisingly slowly from Breguet’s basic invention of the revolving escapement. In constructing a watch wherein the entire train revolves, no such delicate or precise workmanship is required as in the tourbillon. Due to the longer train of gears involved, the period of revolution is much slower. Position errors average out as certainly, if not as frequently. In Bonniksen’s 'Karrusel' watch of 1893 [endnote 2] the duration of a cycle is 52.5 minutes [endnote 3] while in the Auburndale Rotary, which we are about to discuss, the period of each revolution is 2 1/2 hours.

THE INVENTION

The patent model of Jason R. Hopkins’ revolving watch, now in the U. S. National Museum [endnote 4], was not the first in which the entire train revolved, but it was a very novel conception intended to reduce greatly the number of parts usually associated with any watch. This may be seen from Figures 2 and 3, where everything shown inside the ring gear revolves slowly as the main spring runs down. This spring is prevented from running down at its own speed by the train pinion seen in mesh with the ring gear. Through this, pinion motion is imparted to the escape wheel and balance, where the rate of the watch is controlled. The balance, being planted at the center of revolution, travels around its own axis, as in the tourbillon, at the speed with which the entire train revolves around the barrel arbor. This arbor turns only during winding. No dial or dial gearing is shown in the patent or exists in the patent model. The patent merely says, casually, 'By means of dial wheels the motion of the barrel may be communicated to hands and the time indicated in the usual manner.' No fine finish or jeweling has been lavished on the model; the only jewels present being in the balance cock which was utilized as it came from its original watch, with only minor modifications to the shape of its foot. Apparently, the balance wheel itself is also a relic of the same or a similar conventional watch. There is no jeweling in the escapement or on the other end of the balance staff. In spite of this, the model runs very actively and will overbank if wound up very far. The beat of the escapement is two per second and the movement revolves once in 20 minutes.

Figure 2 – Patent Drawing of the Hopkins Watch. The mainspring barrel E