Produced by Chris Curnow, ronnie sahlberg, Joseph Cooper and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net Transcribers note: Possible printer errors have been retained as they appear in the original book. CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE MUSEUM OF HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY: PAPER 4 THE AUBURNDALE WATCH COMPANY _Edwin A. Battison_ THE INVENTION 51 DEVELOPING THE INVENTION 53 THE NEW SPONSOR 57 SUCCESS AND FAILURE 64 THE LESSON 67 _By Edwin A. Battison_ THE AUBURNDALE WATCH COMPANY: _First American Attempt Toward the Dollar Watch_ _The life of the pioneer has always been arduous. Not all succeed, and many disappear leaving no trace on the pages of history. Here, painstaking search has uncovered enough of the record to permit us to review the errors of design and manufacture that brought failure to the first attempt to produce a really cheap pocket watch._ _This paper is based on a study of the patent model of the Auburndale rotary and other products of the company in the collections of the National Museum, and of other collections, including that of the author. The study comprises part of the background research for the hall of timekeeping in the Museum of History and Technology._ THE AUTHOR: _Edwin A. Battison is associate curator of mechanical and civil engineering, Museum of History and Technology, in the Smithsonian Institution's United States National Museum._ The idea of a machine-made watch with interchangeable parts had been in the minds of many men for a long time. Several attempts had been made to translate this conception into a reality. Success crowned the efforts of those working near Boston, Massachusetts, in the 1850's. The work done there formed the basis on which American watch making grew to such a point that by the 1870's watches of domestic manufacture had captured nearly all the home market and were reaching out and capturing foreign markets as well. In spite of this great achievement there remained a large untapped potential market for a watch which would combine the virtues of close time keeping and a lower selling price. Only a radical departure in design could achieve this. Rivalry between the several existing companies had already produced an irreducible minimum price on watches of conventional design.