Elgin Watches

Prior to 1910, all watches were handmade. While this sounds good, like the watches may have been higher quality, the difficulty was that there was no standardization. If the watch you were wearing broke, it was likely very difficult to fix.

The National Watch Company, later called the Elgin National Watch Company, was started in 1864. Though they produced watches, it would be several years before they made wrist watches.

Elgin decided to mass produce watches. Elgin wrist watches were the first to make watches with interchangeable parts. They produced their first writs watch in 1910, and interchangeable parts were a huge innovation.

Elgin is not the source for luxurious, elegant watches. They are designed to be good quality, good prices, and long lasting. Their ideas worked well; Elding sold over 60 million watches.

Elgin also met its goal of making watches that are easy to fix. Collectors find that they can still find replacement parts to old watches.

Every watchmaker has to figure out a way to get the time accurate. Nowadays this is nothing; just find the time on a clock or on another watch. At a time when watches were just for the rich and gradually finding their way to the masses, this was not so easy.

Elgin used to use an observatory to precisely time their watches. That observatory is in use yet today. It is run by the School District of Elgin, Illinois.

As the first to mass produce watches, Elgin has earned a place in the history of watches. This makes it worthwhile to collectors. It is also a good reason to own one yourself