The company now makes ten different sizes of regular movements, in more than a hundred different grades and styles. Of these every part is made in the Waltham factory. It was the first establishment in the world in which all parts of a watch were made by machinery and under the same roof. And its success revolutionized the methods of watch-making not only in America but, to a less degree, in all parts of the world. A prominent London watchmaker who went through the plant in the early period of its success said to his colleagues: "On leaving the factory, I felt that the manufacture of watches on the old plan was gone." And the name passed into literature when Emerson, describing a successful type of man, said, "He is put together like a Waltham watch." CHAPTER FOURTEEN _Checkered History_ One of those mental marvels who can play fifteen simultaneous games of chess, blindfolded, might be able to form a complete idea of the American watch-making industry in the years that followed the Civil War; all that the ordinary mind can gain is a bewildering impression of change and confusion, with companies springing up, and merging or disappearing, all over the industrial map. Inventions were as thick as blackberries in August and, to investors, as thorny as their stems. Countless revolutionary ideas in watch-making revolved briefly—few evolved, and capitalists, large and small, learned the sobering lessons of experience, as capitalists ever have and ever will. [Illustration: "QUANTITY PRODUCTION" IN 1850 _When P. S. Bartlett boasted that his company was making seven watches a day, his friends laughed, "Why, where could you SELL seven watches a day?"_] With it all, certain points seem to stand out as clearly defined—among them the fact that watch-production appealed strongly to the public mind at a time when the nation, galvanized into intense activity by the great conflict, was entering an era of extraordinary self-organization. This is, of course, significant. The nation's time as well as its forests, mines, and other resources, must be a factor in the growth of public wealth, and this could not be unless it were widely and accurately measured, which, in turn, implied the universal use of the watch. The later history of American watch-making is, therefore, a story of the formation of many companies, the failure of most, and survival in the case of comparatively few. In the sense of being founded by men whose experience had been gained at Waltham, the Waltham Company was more or less the parent of the majority. Of the failures, it may roughly and broadly be stated that the general trouble was most often a lack of cooperation between technical watch-making skill and business management.