Robert Johnson, pre-eminent Delta bluesman, sang “She’s got Elgin movements from her head down to her toes” in his 1936 recording of “Walkin’ Blues”.The legendary Elgin watch has become woven into the fabric of America: Over the course of a century, the dream factory just north of Chicago had produced half of all jeweled pocket and wristwatches manufactured in the United States. By 1964, after a Mid-Century decade that saw the rise of the elite “Lord and Lady Elgin” series, the original Elgin factory closed. While their altruism was vital to the war effort, Elgin’s patriotism ironically opened an opportunity for the Swiss. Later, their accurate “wristlet” watches proved to be vital to the WWI war effort, helping to fuel a craze back in the states for something called “The Wrist Watch.” By the opulent Jazz Age, if you weren’t displaying the exuberant symmetry of an Elgin wrist watch or carrying a svelte, distinctive Elgin pocket watch, then who were you? Elgin had helped define the American pocket watch as unsurpassed in “Railroad Accuracy.” By 1930, the post Civil War dream factory imagined by a handful of American entrepreneurs had produced 32 million “time machines.”ĭuring World War II, all civilian manufacturing was halted and the company moved into the defense industry, manufacturing military watches, chronometers, fuses for artillery shells, altimeters and other aircraft instruments and sapphire bearings used for aiming cannons. Elgin engineers built their own Observatory to maintain scientifically precise times in their watches. īy 1910, word of Elgin’s obsession with precision had spread around the world. Raymond.” The watch was exquisite: Elgin National Watch Company was born. After a year of designing and building the lathes and machines to achieve seemingly impossible levels of precision, a team of watchmakers and mechanical engineers produced their first pocket watch movement, named for mayor “B.W. Raymond, purchased an abandoned farm 30 miles north of Chicago and built a watch factory there.

Harper’s magazine summed their sentiment perfectly: “It was the genuine, audacious, self-reliant Western spirit.” By August of that year this consortium, including then-Chicago mayor Benjamin W. In the spring of 1864 half a dozen ambitious Chicago businessmen decided that if Massachusetts could build a factory that built watches – Illinois could, too.

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