But all of these were merely forerunners, for now there stepped upon the stage a young man whose ability and perseverance were destined to launch American watch-making fairly upon its way. This young man was born in Hingham, Massachusetts, in 1813, and his name was Edward Howard; it was born in him to be an inventive and ingenious craftsman and to feel toward the mechanism of time-keeping the devotion of an artist to his art. At the age of sixteen, he was apprenticed to Aaron Willard, Jr., of Roxbury, one of the cleverest clock-makers of his time.
Young Howard took to clock-making as naturally as a Gloucester man takes to the sea. Some of the clocks he then made are still ticking as vigorously as ever. Having presently learned all he cared to know about clock-making, he cast about for other fields of action. His bent, as he himself said, "was all for the finer and more delicate mechanism," and it was natural that these qualities of the watch should absorb his interest. It was equally natural, since he was an American clock-maker at a time when that trade was being revolutionized by machine-work, that he should dream of applying such methods to the watch.
"One difficulty I found," he is quoted as saying, "was that watch-making did not exist in the United States as an industry. There were watchmakers, so-called, at that time, and there are great numbers of the same kind now, but they never made a watch; their business being only to clean and repair. I knew from experience that there was no proper system employed in making watches. The work was all done by hand. Now, hand-work is superior in many of the arts because it allows variation according to the individuality of the worker. But in the exquisitely fine wheels and screws and pinions that make up the parts of a watch, the less variation the better. Some of these parts are so fine as to be almost invisible to the naked eye. A variation of one five-thousandths of an inch would throw the watch out altogether, or make it useless as a timepiece. As I say, all of these minute parts were laboriously cut and filed out by hand, so it will readily be understood that in watches purporting to be of the same size and of the same makers, there are no two alike, and there was no interchangeability of parts. Consequently it was 'cut and try'. A great deal of time was wasted and many imperfections resulted."