The Auburndale Watch Company Part 3

The life of a pioneer has always been arduous. The story we have just reviewed ill.u.s.trates this. Hopkins was a successful workman with clever and novel ideas. Fowle had been very successful in an entirely unrelated field. Wales had been very successful in importing and selling watches but the watch factory which he had owned in part had failed, the fault more probably that of the times than of the man. The various superintendents and foremen were first-cla.s.s men with ample background in making conventional watches. At the time no one could have had experience in manufacturing exactly the grade and type of watch being attempted, for this was the pioneer effort.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Figure 23 (_right_).--AUBURNDALE COUNTER. Pressure on the projecting stem indexes the inner dial, showing through the window, at the same time ringing a bell. This dial is numbered from zero through six. The outside hand is held in place by friction and is manually set as desired. There is no connection with the inner mechanism.]

The country was in the grip of a long, lingering depression following the Civil War. Money was tight. The Auburndale Rotary was conceived as a very low priced watch which would at the same time include the desirable and unusual feature of close timekeeping. Could these ideals have been adhered to, there is little reason to question that it would have found a market, even in hard times.

We have seen that every effort to improve the original watch added to its cost, and here lies the real reason why it failed to win acceptance. By the time it reached the market it was no longer priced below conventional watches and at least some specimens were not reliable in performance. To make matters even worse, the best features of Hopkins' rotary watch had been incorporated by Locke and Merritt into a competing rotary watch much better engineered for cheap ma.s.s production.

At this point the only hope for the factory seemed to be the manufacture of some other watch or similar small mechanism. The Auburndale timer, with the exception perhaps of the split-second model, was a triumph mechanically and it returned a profit, but not enough to meet the financial needs of its sponsors. Much the same may be said of all the later Auburndale products.

The rotary had been of doubtful value when Flowe bought it, and the new organization was not able to contribute the necessary manufacturing engineering to make it a successful product. By the time this necessity was recognized, debts had mounted to the point where later products, which might have been successful on their own, were not able to carry the burden. The whole affair can be viewed as a very expensive educational adventure from which the students were not able to salvage enough to put their education to any use.

Surely they received a clear ill.u.s.tration of how dangerous it can be to engage in an enterprise without sufficient background or a long and careful study of design, manufacturing processes, costs, and market and sales a.n.a.lysis. For although numerous fortunes have been made in watch manufacturing, many more have been lost, and often those who put every effort at their command into such ventures came away with only sad experience as their reward. Thus ended the story of the Auburndale Watch Company.