"One difficulty I found," he is quoted as saying, "was that watch-making did not exist in the United States as an industry. There were watchmakers, so-called, at that time, and there are great numbers of the same kind now, but they never made a watch; their business being only to clean and repair. I knew from experience that there was no proper system employed in making watches. The work was all done by hand. Now, hand-work is superior in many of the arts because it allows variation according to the individuality of the worker. But in the exquisitely fine wheels and screws and pinions that make up the parts of a watch, the less variation the better. Some of these parts are so fine as to be almost invisible to the naked eye. A variation of one five-thousandths of an inch would throw the watch out altogether, or make it useless as a timepiece. As I say, all of these minute parts were laboriously cut and filed out by hand, so it will readily be understood that in watches purporting to be of the same size and of the same makers, there are no two alike, and there was no interchangeability of parts. Consequently it was 'cut and try'. A great deal of time was wasted and many imperfections resulted." Howard's ambition lay in the production of a perfect watch for its own sake; and he wanted to make it by machinery, believing that, in that way, it could be made most perfectly. Other people had thought of the same thing. Pitkin had attempted it, and there had been some experiments of like nature in Switzerland. But the man who loves his work as Howard did will succeed in anything short of the impossible, because neither time nor labor, neither failure nor discouragement, matter at all to him as against the hope of making his dream come true. As Howard was emerging into young manhood, the great period of American invention was rapidly developing. Morse was struggling with the electric telegraph which he invented and perfected in 1835, and Goodyear was busy with machinery and processes for enabling rubber to be used commercially, thus laying the foundation for one of the greatest American industries of to-day. Ingenuity was in the air and invention was conquering realms that had been believed beyond reach. When people told Howard that it was absurd to think of improving upon the manual skill of centuries, he answered that he expected to make his machinery by hand. And when they said that a machine for watch-making would be more wonderful than the watch itself, he only laughed and agreed that this might be so.