Episode Details

Episode 15: "American Watchmaking — The Industry That Died and Is Being Rebuilt"

You can find a ton of info on more American brands here:

https://americanwatchmakingdirectory.org

Description:

America was once the watchmaking capital of the world (Waltham, Elgin, Hamilton, Gruen)

producing over 100 million pocket watches between 1850 and 1950, inventing the railroad-grade

accuracy standard, and teaching American production methods to European manufacturers.

Then, across the second half of the twentieth century, the industry almost entirely collapsed.

Hamilton's last movement rolled off the Lancaster, Pennsylvania line in 1969. The next

American-made mechanical movement wouldn't appear for 38 years.

This episode traces both the collapse and the quiet, determined rebuild; through five brands

working at very different levels and price points. Vortic Watch Company in Fort Collins,

Colorado, restores antique American pocket watch movements from Illinois, Elgin, Waltham,

Ball, Hamilton, and Hamilton and converts them into wristwatches using cases made in their

own Colorado facility...the most direct possible bridge between the original American

watchmaking industry and the present. Cincinnati Watch Company, founded in 2018 by Rick

Bell and Mark Stegman with WOSTEP-certified co-owner watchmaker Jordan Ficklin, is the first

brand to assemble watches in Cincinnati since Gruen closed in 1958. Weiss Watch Company,

founded in Los Angeles in 2013 by WOSTEP-trained Cameron Weiss, makes the Caliber 1003 in-

house — machined, hand-jeweled, plated, and finished in California. RGM Watch Company,

founded in 1992 by Roland G. Murphy in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania, produced the first American-

made mechanical movement in 38 years with the 2007/2008 Caliber 801, and then the first

American tourbillon with the Pennsylvania Tourbillon. And J.N. Shapiro Watches, run by former

school principal Joshua Shapiro in Inglewood, California, released the Resurgence in 2023... a

watch with 148 of 180 components made in their California workshop, meeting the FTC's all or

virtually all standard for the first time since 1969. Plus: the 2015 Hodinkee article by Nicholas

Manousos, the FTC investigation into the American watch industry's use of Made in USA, and

what the reckoning ultimately produced.

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