In 1854 the name was changed again, this time to the American Watch Company. Incidentally, Mr. Dennison took his place among the large and honorable company of inventors who have been called insane. He earned that title by saying that they would eventually make as many as fifty watches a day. The company now makes between two thousand and three thousand a day. Just as they were on the point of a richly deserved success, the panic of 1857 drove the young company into bankruptcy. The plant was purchased by Royal E. Robbins, of the firm of Robbins & Appleton, watch importers. Howard went back to the old factory at Roxbury, taking with him a few trained workmen, and patiently started all over again. He succeeded, at last, in producing really fine watches, although in small numbers; and his new business, as we shall see later, developed into the E. Howard Clock Company, and practically abandoned the manufacture of watches. Meanwhile, the Waltham factory, under good business management and with Dennison as its superintendent, was safely steered past the financial rocks and shoals of the period, and began gradually to reap the reward of its less fortunate early efforts. It was the Civil War, with its great military demand for watches, which first set the Waltham Company squarely upon its feet by justifying quantity production. A dividend of five per cent was declared in 1860; and one of one hundred and fifty per cent in 1866, the short-lived Nashua Watch Company having meanwhile been absorbed. Since that date its name has been twice changed—first, to the American Waltham Watch Company, and then to the Waltham Watch Company, which is now its title. At the present day, the Waltham Company employs nearly four thousand people and produces about sixty-eight thousand complete watch-movements a month, or over three-quarters of a million a year. This output is made possible only through the extensive employment of automatic machines, all of which have been invented and manufactured at the Waltham factory. Even now it is not possible to buy watch-making machinery ready-made in the open market; it is all "special" work, designed and often built by the watch manufacturers themselves. And the development of this great industry, employing, at first, crude devices operated for the most part by hand-power, to the complex automatic mechanism which seems to act almost with human intelligence, has been a marvelous achievement.