Ironhorse Timepieces — From the Workshop

The Pocket Watch and the People Who Wore It

For most of the 19th century, only the wealthy owned a watch. By 1900, an Elgin could be had for a week's factory wages. In one generation, personal timekeeping went from privilege to necessity — and it belonged, in one form or another, to nearly everyone.

The railroad engineer is the obvious figure in this story, and rightly so. His watch was a certified instrument — inspected quarterly, worn in a dedicated vest pocket to minimize shock, wound at the same time each day without exception. A railroad man's relationship with his watch was closer to that of a pilot with his instruments than a gentleman with a trinket. It was the tool on which lives depended. The factory foreman, the frontier surveyor, the traveling salesman — all carried their watches as working instruments, symbols of reliability, and in many cases, the most valuable object they owned.

But the pocket watch was never exclusively a man's object. While the large, austere railroad grades were built for the working waistcoat, the great American and Swiss manufacturers simultaneously produced an entirely different tradition — smaller, finer, and often breathtakingly beautiful watches made expressly for women. These were not afterthoughts. They were a serious and celebrated part of the catalogue.

Waltham, Elgin, and Illinois all produced ladies' movements in sizes 6, 0 and size 3/0 — delicate calibres housed in cases of yellow gold, white gold, and platinum, engraved with florals, set with seed pearls, sapphires, or diamonds, and worn on a chatelaine or tucked into an evening bag. Swiss houses elevated this tradition further still: Patek Philippe and Vacheron Constantin produced ladies' pocket watches of extraordinary refinement, and Tiffany & Co. served as the retail face of some of the most coveted pieces in circulation. For the fashionable woman of the Gilded Age and the early 20th century, a fine pocket watch was as much a jewel as a timepiece — worn, displayed, and inherited with the same reverence as a brooch or a ring.

What unites all of them — the engineer gripping his lever-set Bunn Special in the cab of a locomotive and the woman drawing a pearl-cased Waltham from her evening bag — is that the watch was personal in a way few objects were. Many were engraved with initials, dates, or dedications that outlasted the people who gave them. Open the caseback of a century-old movement and you may still find a name scratched into the plate — a quiet act of ownership that crossed a hundred years to reach you.

At Ironhorse, we think about all of them when we sit down at the bench.

Filed under History  ·  American Culture  ·  Railroad

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