Thus, when the scheme-trade died away and the company again turned its attention to the watch-dealers whom it had forgotten in the flush of its easy success, it found no welcome. It had forsaken its source of steady customers and was now forsaken in return. After floundering about in several further reversals of trade policy and causing the loss of further investment for its backers, the Waterbury name was abandoned and the company reorganized as the New England Watch Company. As such it ventured into new fields of watch manufacture and offered an elaborate variety of small and fancy watches and cases, and numerous models, sizes, and styles of movements sold on vacillating marketing policies. Never did it attain a genuinely sound footing, however, for it vacated its field of fundamental and distinctive usefulness, viz., the production of a reliable, low-priced, simple watch, to meet the advancing requirements of its day; it had gone back to the view-point of the watch as an ostentatious or ornamental bit of vanity. Hence the old Waterbury business was compelled to close its doors, and in the fall of 1914, the first year of the Great War, was bought out at a receiver's sale by a firm who had replaced it in the field of supplying watches for the masses. This firm rededicated the organization to its original mission, modernized its mechanical equipment, and revived the Waterbury name after a lapse of twenty years, until to-day, through the employment of judicious sales-methods, the factory is more successful than ever it was in its earlier days. CHAPTER SIXTEEN "_The Watch That Made the Dollar Famous_" The next development is so typically American that it is difficult to picture it as occurring in any other country. Heretofore, the history of timepieces had been that of an easily traceable evolution, for each of its steps had grown naturally out of those before it, and the various improvements had been made by mechanics trained in the craft. Yet now, strange to relate, two young men from a Michigan farm, with no mechanical training, entered the field almost in a casual manner, and in less than a generation not only became the world's largest manufacturers of watches but effected the most radical development in the whole story of telling time—involving, as it did, the introduction of interchangeable parts, quantity-production, and a low price. These results might seem at first, to be due to a matter of accidental good fortune. On the contrary, they were an example of evolution quite as logical as any that had preceded and were perhaps even more significant. The whole development came as the direct product of observation, analysis, initiative, perseverance, and hard work—the element of good luck being conspicuously absent.