The United States in the commencement of its career and at the opening of the century had no clocks or watches of its own manufacture. But it soon followed the example of Germany and Switzerland and established cheap clock manufactories, first of wood, and then of metal, which became famous and of world-wide use. But it could make no headway against the cheap labour of Europe in watch-making, and the country was flooded with watches of all qualities, principally from Switzerland and England. Finally, at the half-way mark in the century, the inquiry arose among Americans, why could not the system of the minute sub-division of human labour followed in watch-making countries so cheaply and profitably, be accomplished by machinery? The field was open, the prize was great, and the government stood ready to grant exclusive patents to every inventor who would devise a new and useful machine. The problem was great, as the fields abroad had been filled for generations by skilled artisans who had reduced the complicated mechanism of watch-making to a fine art. Fortunately the habit had been established in America in several of the leading industries, principally in that of fire-arms, of fabricating separate machinery for the independent making of numerous parts of the same implement, whereby uniformity and interchangeability were established. Under such a practice, which was known as the American system, a duplicate of the smallest part of a complicated machine, lost or worn out thousands of miles from the factory, could soon be furnished by simply sending the number or name of such required part to the manufacturer, or to the nearest dealer in such machines.