The cases and cabinets for export are usually forwarded in a rough or unfinished state for greater convenience in shipping, and for the further reason that the labor required to complete them can be secured much cheaper abroad than in this country.

A great deal of attention has been given by inventors to the production of a suitable means of propulsion for the sewing machine, thus doing away with the labor of operating it by the ordinary foot treadle. A great number of experiments have been tried with water motors, air engines, steam engines, and springs and weights, but no effective motor was produced until the introduction of electricity for power. Electric sewing motors are now produced which are very effective in their operation and can be readily used in their smallest form in connection with the ordinary household machines, while larger sizes are available for the larger machines used for manufacturing purposes. Steam power is also extensively used in connection with the larger machines in factories, this power usually being applied by means of shafting under the long rows of tables bearing the machines, one row of shafting operating two rows of machines.

The introduction of the sewing machine has had a tendency to concentrate certain industries into large establishments, thus reducing the cost of production. This is especially true in the case of clothing manufacture, and in that of the manufacture of boots and shoes. Where formerly the manufacture of clothing was carried on in small shops employing hand labor, and in the household, it is now frequently done in immense establishments employing a great number of operatives and using hundreds of machines.

In recent years American sewing machine manufacturers, finding it impossible, on account of the difference in the rates of wages, to compete by home manufacture with the manufacturers of Europe in the markets of the other continents, were forced to extend their manufacturing operations to foreign countries. Some of the leading American manufacturers now have branch establishments in Europe and elsewhere, where labor can be secured more cheaply than at home, and have them equipped with American machinery and tools

for producing duplicates of the home product for the foreign markets. In some cases, these establishments are of immense proportions, their output equaling that of the home plants. It is estimated that the number of American sewing machines sold abroad each year, including the American machines made in foreign countries, is about equal to the number disposed of in the home markets by all of the American companies. The exports of American sewing machines since 1860 will aggregate about $90,000,000 in value. No greater testimony of the superiority of the American sewing machine could be demonstrated than its enormous foreign sale, as shown in part by the exports.

THE REVOLUTION IN WATCHMAKING.

BY WILLIAM A. COUNTRYMAN.

[William A. Countryman, editor and statistician; born New Haven, Conn., July, 1852; educated in private schools, literary editor of the Hartford Post, 1883; afterward managing editor; appointed to the United States census office in 1900; since his connection with the census office has edited Mines and Quarries, and conducted several investigations including one into the watchmaking industry. Author: The Golden Clock, Old Days in Hartford, poems, etc.]

The watch came to the United States from the old world perfect in principle. There have been no improvements for many years in arrangement of train, in escapements, or in other parts of movements. Its evolution from the clock with its pendulum, through the table clock with its lever, and thus to the perfect pocket timepiece, is a part of the history of Germany, of Great Britain, of France, and of Switzerland.

The English are said to have been the first successful watchmakers, and about a century and a half ago applied to the industry a division of labor which at one time had multiplied into 102 distinct branches. The Swiss adopted this principle and extended it, giving employment to familiesmen, women, and children—at their homes. As the price of this labor was very low, and there were few other industries at which employment could be found, the Swiss became the watchmakers of the world, not only furnishing some of the most costly timepieces, but also some of the cheapest and most worthless. While the Swiss still manufacture a great many watches, which are sent to many parts of the world, it is a significant fact that some jobbers, who handled their goods a few years ago under an American name, advertised that the movements were made by the most improved American automatic machinery, insuring accuracy and precision. It is said to be a common practice thus to advertise Swiss movements, excepting those of the costliest varieties, upon which the hand work is of the most skillful and painstaking character or expended in fanciful combinations. It is asserted by manufacturers in the United States that the Ameri

can machinery used in Switzerland has been rendered obsolete here by the advance of invention; but its adoption there is a most substantial recognition of the superiority of machine made watches. It is also asserted that, while the Swiss watch trade fell off a few years ago, this loss has been partly recovered by the adoption of these American machines and American methods.

The earliest watches made in Europe took a year, it is said, in their making, cost the equivalent of $1,500 apiece, and varied in their timekeeping from forty minutes to an hour a day. At the Waltham, Mass., factory nearly 600,000 watch movements were made during a single year, or nearly 2,000 complete movements for each working day-not quite one a day per employee-more than any other factory in the world and a greater yearly production than any other country except Switzerland. The cost of these movements varies from $3 to $75, and their timekeeping quality is best shown by the fact that the three American watches which received the highest award for accuracy of rate at the centennial exposition at Philadelphia in 1876, showed in 1876, showed an average daily variation of only twenty three hundredths of a second.

The unanswerable arguments showing the superiority of machine made watches are now widely known and admitted, but they were made only a few years ago with most disheartening results. Almost everybody preferred a handmade watch, notwithstanding its greater cost, when of any worth as a timepiece, and the lack of interchangeable parts with which it could be cheaply repaired, on the theory that hand work was more accurate; but now conditions are reversed, and an American machine made watch is preferred by the great number of persons who desire accuracy and durability at a reasonable price. An inventor puts the argument briefly thus: "If one of the qualities demanded in any certain kind of work be the highest attainable degree of uniformity, it will be readily admitted that the individual workman, with the certainty of constantly recurring periods of fatigue, which make imperative corresponding periods of rest, is at a great disadvantage when in competition with an impersonal and tireless machine which is capable of producing work of a like

kind. It is also evident that if the large number of required pieces, whose function is the same, can be made with dimensions exactly uniform, there would result a great reduction in cost of manufacture because of the avoidance of any individual or special fitting of the various parts." In the hand system it is impossible that parts, upon which a hundred different personalities have been stamped, should come together with the precision required for such a delicate mechanism as a watch. The further the division of hand labor is carried the greater become the chances of imperfection; but with automatic machinery the most delicate processes are accomplished with complete uniformity and finish.

M. Edouard Favre-Perret states that 40,000 workmen in Switzerland each make an average of 40 watches yearly. But the average in the United States in 1880 was 150; at Waltham it is over 250. It takes about five months to complete a single watch of the highest grade; but all processes are going on simultaneously, and the flow of the product is therefore continuous. In a lecture before the Horological institute of London, more than thirty years ago, an English watchmaker who had visited the Waltham factory remarked: "On leaving the factory, I felt that the manufacture of watches on the old plan was gone."

Various sporadic attempts, beginning, it is said, as early as 1809, had been made in this country to manufacture watches by hand, but all had ended in dismal failure, owing to inability to compete in price with the Swiss made watch. When competition with Europe was thus found impossible, inventors in the United States thought they might construct them successfully by machinery, and in 1838 Pitkin Brothers established a plant at Hartford, Conn., for the manufacture of watches by machinery. After manufacturing about eight hundred movements, they were compelled to abandon their project. At this time the Swiss were using machines for special operations in making watches. In 1839 Gischot established a factory at Geneva, Switzerland, for making the movements of a watch by machinery, and a few years after F. P. Ingold, another Swiss, elaborated a series of both case

Vol. 7-23