The Osaka Watch Co was the final chapter in the Otay/San Jose/Osaka trilogy. After the failure of the first two ventures in California, the watch-making machinery originally purchased from American Tool was sold to the O…

Pocket watches were designed and built during the glorious age of dedicated, purpose-built tooling, meaning that they did one thing and they did it very well. 12-in-1 multi-tools sold on infomercials were thankfully stil…

Rockford saved some of their most interesting patterns for private labels and had a particular fondness for the square-on-round damaskeening, the only factory to do it in quantity. Their Model 6 was the predecessor to th…

Waltham was one of only three companies to make 18-size wind-indicators. While Elgin and Rockford indicator hands simply coast to a stop in a circular seconds bit, Waltham’s Model 92 version limited the hand to a travel …

As collectors, we love unusual variants, like this 18-size Seth Thomas Century fronting a traffic-stopping green guilloche dial with gold numerals, and the unusual thing is that both are unmarked. It’s very common for Mo…

A new customer from Virginia had been given a Hamilton 992E by an older acquaintance that he occasionally chatted with at his local coffee shop. The conversation had turned to pocket watches, and his friend said that he …

Installing a crystal is something that may happen multiple times in the service life of a watch, assuming that it was a daily carry piece back in the day, and easily could’ve been changed at least once before it came int…

The Seth Thomas Models 6 and 7, marketed by the company as the Eagle, is one my favorite lesser grades because of the engraved eagle on the plates of the first few thousand examples. SN 515501 is the earliest known open-…

Cripple Creek was the site of Colorado’s last great gold rush, as thousands of tin pans descended on the area in 1890. After everything of value was stripped from the earth it became a ghost town but now serves as a base…

In 1854 the Warren Manufacturing Co moved from Roxbury to the newly-built factory in Waltham and changed their name to the Boston Watch Co. Up to that point roughly a thousand watches had been produced: the first twenty …