I’m a watch accumulator, not a watch collector. A collector has a plan and a purpose, and I just buy cool old watches at estate auctions.
In a lot of ways, a high grade watch was like a high grade pipe, over a century ago.
The best were obscenely expensive. Usually the owner took meticulous care of what might have been a gift on a special occasion.
I won this Waltham watch for twenty dollars and maybe spent a hundred getting it cleaned, oiled, and gone over by a watchmaker about twenty years ago.
It was made in 1891, cased in 1892, is the highest $70 grade Crescent Street in a $30 quality gold filled hunter case, and has a glass porcelain double sunk dial in perfect condition. It’s still not wildly valuable, but it keeps time to a couple of seconds a day and ought to be good for centuries to come if not just beat to death.
That watch was fifteen jewels, and in 1891 was Waltham’s highest grade and most expensive watch.
Hamilton watches had 17 jewels, starting in 1893, caused Waltham and Elgin and Howard and other makers to match them for jewel count.
A 17 jewel watch gets two hole jewels for the wheel for the hour hand.
The hour hand turns twice a day, or 730 turns a year. If Fred Hert’s watch has run continually for 132 years that’s less than 100,000 turns on the hour hand. It needs oil, but not really a set of jewel bearings.
That balance wheel that has two hole jewels for bearings and two cap jewels to hold oil and keep it in one place, turns 18,000 times
an hour, or 432,000 turns each day.
It is an absolute industrial miracle that balance wheel spins over 150 million times a year, and has spun billions of times and is still as accurate as a modern high grade watch.
And they figured that all out in 1883 and Waltham made over five million 1883 model movements, the most of any model of American watch.
And by 1940 Hamilton made a 992B that’s not as ornate, but it is far more durable and more accurate, but at two or three seconds a day there wasn’t a lot of room left to improve accuracy.
My 992B, worth about $300 at most.
If you want a railroad grade American watch and don’t have one I can’t recommend a Hamilton 992B enough.
Every part on a 992B is available and any good watchmaker can fix one. The 992B was made until 1969 and was the last official railroad watch, and every watchmaker had modern parts.
If Fred Hert’s watch breaks down, the last parts were made in 1917 and it takes a master watchmaker to fix one.