Waterbury Clock Company

A Connecticut brass company's clock offshoot that made millions of cheap watches, survived the Depression with Mickey Mouse, and grew into Timex.

A brass company's clock business

The Waterbury Clock Company was founded on March 5, 1857, as a joint stock corporation set up by the Benedict and Burnham Manufacturing Company, a Waterbury brass firm, so that the new company could use its parent's brass. The Stark Cultural Venues collection notes that two well-known clockmakers, Chauncey and Noble Jerome, ran its casemaking and movement work in the early years.

Between 1900 and 1915 a series of expansions made its factory the largest clock manufacturing plant in America, according to the same history.

Dollar watches and Mickey Mouse

Waterbury became a major maker of low-priced pocket watches for R. H. Ingersoll and Brother, a mail-order firm famous for its dollar watch. The Stark Cultural Venues history puts the start of this work after 1890, and the Connecticut Mills survey dates the contract to 1892. ConnecticutHistory.org names the Yankee, sold for one dollar, as Waterbury's top-selling model. When Ingersoll went bankrupt after World War I, Waterbury bought its operation in 1922.

The two firms also helped popularize a newer kind of timepiece. During World War I, ConnecticutHistory.org says, Waterbury adapted an Ingersoll ladies' pocket watch for soldiers by adding a canvas strap and glowing numbers, which helped make the wristwatch a civilian product too.

The Depression nearly finished the business, which by then traded as Ingersoll-Waterbury. By 1932 it was struggling to stay solvent. Its rescue came from a deal with Walt Disney's studio: the Mickey Mouse watch, introduced in June 1933 and shown at the Chicago World's Fair that year. ConnecticutHistory.org reports that Macy's sold 11,000 of them on the first day.

War work and the birth of Timex

After the United States entered World War II, the company switched almost entirely to military production. Norwegian businessmen Thomas Olsen and Joakim Lehmkuhl, who had fled the Nazi occupation of their country, managed it from 1941, and in 1942 a new 120,000-square-foot plant went up in Middlebury, Connecticut, in 88 days. Connecticut Mills calls the company the country's largest maker of time fuses during the war.

In 1944 it was renamed the United States Time Corporation and began making Timex watches for nurses, according to Connecticut Mills. Around 1950 the Timex watch went on general sale and became very popular, and in 1969 the company itself became the Timex Corporation. Large additions in the 1960s and 1970s roughly doubled the Middlebury building, and Connecticut Mills notes that Timex is now owned by a Dutch holding company.

See also: the big names behind everyday watches on OnlineClock.app.

Identifying a Waterbury clock

Waterbury usually marked its clocks clearly. A one-day shelf clock made between 1870 and 1900, now at The Henry Ford, has an upper label giving the model name, Small Gothic, and the words manufactured by Waterbury Clock Company, plus a lower label reading Waterbury Clock Co., Waterbury, Conn.

Movements can carry useful dates. A 30-hour shelf clock in the National Watch and Clock Museum, the NAWCC's museum, has Waterbury Clock Co. stamped on the movement along with patent dates from 1890 to 1894, and Waterbury Clock Co. U.S.A. on the dial. A clock cannot be older than the latest patent date it shows, so those stamps give you a starting point. That clock has a time-only, spring-driven brass movement that runs for 30 hours, an ivory dial with Arabic numerals, and a case with the figure of a girl in a hat standing beside the clock.

Model names like Small Gothic can be checked against reprinted Waterbury catalogs. Pocket watches marked Ingersoll may also have Waterbury works inside, given the long partnership between the two companies.

See also: choosing a shelf or mantel clock today on OnlineClock.app.

Keep exploring

Sources

1. Waterbury Clock Company, Stark Cultural Venues collections
2. Timex (Middlebury) mill record, Connecticut Mills (Preservation Connecticut)
3. Waterbury Clock Company Saved by Mickey Mouse, ConnecticutHistory.org
4. Waterbury Clock Company Shelf Clock, 1870-1900, The Henry Ford
5. Shelf clock, Waterbury Clock Company, National Watch and Clock Museum (NAWCC)