Depending on your preference, you can choose between open face pocket watches or hunter pocket watches, the cases of which generally cover the entire watch face. A railroad pocket watch was generally considered to be one of the highest grade watches available at the time, responsible for ensuring the burgeoning railway system ran on schedule. Many were Railroad Watches or “standard watches,” as they were often called in the railroad industry, designed to meet railway standards. Elgin Pocket WatchĪs Elgin produced pocket watches for over half a century, there are a variety of styles to choose from based on the decade that the watch was made and its original purpose. Here are some broad recommendations and past prices of Elgin watches to help you get started on your collecting journey. Plus, the high-volume of production has meant that the prices for collectible Elgin watches have stayed relatively low, ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars depending on the make and model. Likewise, Elgin designed its products to be easily repairable and with so many spare parts produced over the course of its 100-year history, its watches can still be bought and fixed reasonably easily even today, making them popular collectibles for enthusiasts. For example, the company produced its first wristwatch around 1910, many years before most other American watch companies.
That’s not to say the Elgin National Watch Company wasn’t innovative, as it most certainly was. – America’s other watch-making powerhouse at the time – for a number of decades. The goal wasn’t to produce the best watches, or the cheapest, but rather to dominate the substantial middle-ground of the American watch market, which they did successfully, enjoying something of a duopoly with Waltham Watch Co.
The founders of the Elgin National Watch Company recognized that there was a need for good quality, reliable watches that could be sold and repaired relatively inexpensively using factory made replacement parts that didn’t require hand adjusting. If one part of a watch broke, someone with the right tools and skill-set to make a replacement would need to fix it, a potentially time-consuming and expensive process. By today’s standards that seems like a completely rational, if not obvious approach, however it should be noted up until around 1850, watches were made mostly by hand. The underlying idea was to mass produce high-quality pocket watches using machine-made, interchangeable parts. Back then, the business traded under the name “National Watch Company,” but this would later be changed to the “Elgin National Watch Company,” as most of the watch trade and public referred to its products as “watches from Elgin.”Īs one of the few true American watch manufacturers, the Elgin National Watch Company produced around 60 million watches over the course of its 100-year history, making it the largest American watch manufacturer in terms of total production volume. By way of context, pork chops were selling for three cents a pound at the time. Elgin Watches: The Rise of an American Watchmakerįounded in 1864 in Elgin, Illinois, just as the American Civil War was coming to an end, the company released its first watch to the market in 1867, an 18 sized BW Raymond railroad grade pocket watch, which took six months to complete and sold for a whopping $117 (several years ago, it was purchased at auction by the City of Elgin for $15,000). If you’ve always wanted to own a piece of functional American history, without breaking the bank, then a wrist or pocket watch from the Elgin National Watch Company may just be exactly what you’ve been looking for. Elgin watches, some of the most in-demand antique watches in the market today, are a perennial favorite among watch collectors.
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