In 1913, the Elgin National Watch Company published a booklet that described, with obvious pleasure, the most unsettling building in town. A small domed structure on a hill above the factory, its lights flickering on and off all night, day after day. The company knew how it sounded. It suggested the building deserved a statue of Father Time on its roof more than any other in America.
Realistic illustration of the Elgin observatory on its hill at night, a lit dome above the factory chimneys and rail yards of Elgin, Illinois, under the Milky Way.
The flickering lights were part of a machine built to answer a question that sounds simple. Correct time, please? When you set your watch to the answer, where does that time come from? The company's answer was the stars, and it spent real money to prove it. Before standard time spread across America, the observatory's Wikipedia entry notes, the neighboring state of Wisconsin alone ran on more than thirty-eight different local times. Railroads had fixed much of that by 1893, when the General Railroad Timepiece Standards required watches accurate within thirty seconds a week.
Elgin was the biggest supplier. By 1907 it was selling more than 600,000 watches a year, almost a third of the American market, and employing around 3,200 people. In 1910 it built an observatory two blocks east of the factory, at 312 Watch Street, on a gravel hill that absorbs vibration. It appointed William W. Payne, from the Goodsell Observatory, as director, and adopted a slogan that would sit on its advertising for decades: Elgin takes the time from the stars and puts it in your pocket.
Realistic illustration of an astronomer at a desk of record books and figuring pads in an early twentieth-century observatory office, a telescope visible through the open door, evoking William W. Payne, the director Elgin appointed in 1910.
The method was astronomical bookkeeping. A transit telescope on its own concrete pier could only swing north and south along the meridian, with eleven strands of spider web across the eyepiece. As a catalogued star crossed each strand, an observer pressed a key, and a pen on a revolving drum recorded the moment as a tiny wiggle. Compared with the almanac's predicted crossing, the difference gave the clock's error, with the 1913 booklet claiming an accuracy of one hundredth of a second. Elgin even built a machine to measure the observer: the personal equation, a person's habit of pressing a hair early or late, was recorded and subtracted from every result.
The clocks did the remembering. The same entry names them as Riefler precision pendulum clocks, numbers 220 and 224, one running sidereal time and one running solar time, each on a pier sunk about 60 feet (18 m) into the gravel. The vault was held at 81 degrees Fahrenheit (27 degrees Celsius) by 58 light bulbs, each switching on and off with its own thermostat, which explains the flickering. The booklet puts the average daily temperature swing at about a tenth of a degree Fahrenheit (about 0.06 degrees Celsius).
The clocks sat in sealed glass jars with the air partly pumped out, so the astronomers regulated them by changing the air pressure, not the pendulum. The booklet says one millimeter on the internal barometer scale shifted a clock by eighteen thousandths of a second a day. On cloudy nights the sidereal clock simply ran on its known daily rate, which the booklet says seldom varied by more than two hundredths of a second. The astronomers did not set their clock. They measured it.
Realistic illustration of two precision pendulum clocks in a dark vault beside a heavy door, one sealed under a glass jar, in the manner of the Riefler clocks, numbers 220 and 224, that held Elgin's time.
A master clock on a hill is only useful if the time can come down. A sounder in the factory ticked the seconds audibly so workers could set watches against it, and a switchboard in the observatory sent signals to the company's offices in Chicago. The observatory also doubled as a weather station, equipped by the state of Illinois, with reports going to Springfield and to local newspapers. Humidity mattered to delicate watchmaking work, so the factory got its own report. None of this changed how an Elgin movement was cut or finished. What it changed was what Elgin could say about its watches. The 1913 booklet claims that the best of its railroad watches were adjusted under the observatory's direction, which turned the slogan on the advertisements into something closer to a specification. How far that claim reaches into an actual watch is a question for the collector's pages below.
Realistic illustration of watchmakers in white coats at long benches in an early twentieth-century Elgin factory room, a wall clock above the door and an Elgin Watch Company sign painted on the wall.
In 1926 the building's upper office room became a radio room, built to transmit short-wave signals, and one account says the observatory held an experimental license to broadcast time signals. That same year Elgin presented the Chicago Jewelers' Association with a bronze street clock topped by a statue of Father Time about five feet (1.5 m) tall, with a base weighing eight tons (about seven metric tons). It still stands at the Jewelers' Building on Wacker Drive, where Elgin kept its general offices. So Elgin got its Father Time in the end, though not on the observatory's roof, as the 1913 booklet had suggested, but above a Chicago sidewalk. The Father Time on the clock echoes the one on Elgin's logo, which appeared in its advertising and gave its name to one of its railroad grades.
Realistic illustration of the bronze Elgin street clock topped by a statue of Father Time on a Chicago street corner in the 1930s, period cars passing below.
Precision could not save the company from the market. The Depression hit Elgin hard, Swiss makers pulled ahead after the war, and in 1950 a cheap, disposable wristwatch from the United States Time Corporation, which became Timex, changed what customers expected to pay. By the late 1950s Elgin had largely stopped making watches in Illinois, and the great factory beside the Fox River, which a state marker calls the first watch factory west of the Alleghenies and eventually the world's largest, closed in 1965 and was demolished the following year. The last Elgin movements came out of a plant in Elgin, South Carolina, in 1968.
Realistic illustration of an empty watchmaking hall in the closed Elgin factory, dust hanging in the light from the roof windows and a single small part left on a workbench.
The observatory outlived its purpose quietly. One local-history account says the advances in technology that created the demand for it also ended it, as better methods of timekeeping overtook its accuracy, and that two years after it closed it was donated to the local school district. The sources disagree on the exact dates, as we note at the end, and the district added a planetarium in 1963, the first school-district planetarium in Illinois.
The building at 312 Watch Street was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on 16 August 1994, largely through the efforts of its planetarium director, Gary Kutina. The City of Elgin now calls the neighborhood around it the Elgin National Watch Historic District. Another reminder is the First Universalist Church on Villa Street, built in 1892 to resemble a pocket watch, with the pulpit where the XII would be. According to its Wikipedia entry, its architect, George Hunter, was one of the easterners who came west to start the watch factory. Almost everything else of the factory is gone, which makes the little observatory the best surviving witness to what the company understood about time.
Realistic illustration of the Elgin observatory building as it stands today, white walls and a domed roof above a stone retaining wall in the light of early evening.
What Veritas and Father Time mean to a collector
As far as we can tell, the observatory did not issue individual certificates for retail watches. What it gave Elgin was credibility: a place to point at when it sold the idea that its watches were adjusted against real time. That promise lives most clearly in two grade names, and knowing the difference between them is the quickest way to read an Elgin railroad watch.
Veritas is Latin for truth, and it was the name Elgin gave its top railroad line. It began on 18-size three-quarter-plate movements in the early 1900s, with 21 or 23 jewels, and the 16-size version followed around 1905. Around 1912 Elgin dropped the 18-size flagship and settled on a single 23-jewel 16-size Veritas, while the 21-jewel movements were moved under the Father Time name. According to the Pocket Watch Database's grade list, some early Veritas grades were made in small runs, around 1,000 pieces for a single grade in 1907 to 1909. The 1913 booklet says the Veritas received the most careful scientific adjustment under the direction of the observatory, and sold from $29 in a nickel case to $52 in gold filled.
Realistic illustration of an Elgin Veritas 23-jewel, 16-size pocket watch movement on a watchmaker's bench beside a loupe and a desk lamp.
Father Time is the watch the railroaders actually carried. A Father Time is a 21-jewel railroad movement, usually 16 or 18 size, built to the same railroad standards of five positions, temperature and isochronism, lever-set and open-faced, but without the extra jewels. One collector-dealer calls Veritas Elgin's Sunday best and Father Time its everyday railroad movement, and that is the fairest summary we have found. Production could still be modest: a dealer's listing for a 1917 grade 374 with an up-and-down wind indicator cites about 11,000 made in total.
Our reading as dealers is this. A Veritas tells you what Elgin wanted its best watch to be, and a Father Time tells you what the railroads wanted it to be. The Veritas is the better trophy, but the Father Time is the more honest tool, and in good original condition it is usually the easier watch to find.
Realistic illustration of an Elgin Father Time 21-jewel, 16-size pocket watch movement beside its open-face case on a watchmaker's bench.
What to check before you buy
Read the grade and jewel count on the movement first, then the adjustment markings, which should say five positions and temperature. Check that the dial and movement belong together, since Montgomery-style dials with bold Arabic numerals are correct for the period but dials were sometimes swapped. Remember that Elgin generally did not make cases, which often came from the Illinois Watch Case Company of Elgin, so a case marked Elgin tells you nothing about the movement. Use the serial number for the year: one published table gives roughly 4,000,000 in 1890, 13,500,000 in 1908, 29,100,000 in 1926 and 42,500,000 in 1944.
Where the sources disagree
The closure of the observatory is dated 1955, 1958 or simply "two years before the 1960 donation", depending on the source. The end of Elgin watchmaking is given as the late 1950s in some accounts and 1968 in others, depending on whether you count the Illinois factory or the South Carolina plant. Several sources say Elgin was the only watch company to maintain an observatory for time-taking, while another calls it typical of American makers, and we have avoided the superlative. The details of the observatory building come from its Wikipedia entry, whose National Register source we could not retrieve because the National Park Service has not digitized the file. Finally, much of the technical detail in this piece comes from one company booklet written to sell watches, so read its claims about accuracy as marketing, even if the engineering was real.