As majority owner, Robbins reorganized the company as Appleton, Tracy & Co. Appleton, New York watch wholesalers, along with Tracy and Baker, watch case manufactures in Philadelphia, purchased The Boston Watch Company factory and part of the other assets at the auction. The Boston Watch Company was sold at auction in April 1857. Sales dropped, debts climbed and bankruptcy became inevitable.
The company produced gilded full plate pocket watches ranging from 7 to 15 jewels which found acceptance in the industry, the first pocket watch produced in America of standard interchangeable parts, fostering growth until the country began experiencing a recession in 1856. to Boston Watch Company in September 1853, and a new factory in Waltham, Massachusetts was opened in October 1854. In the spring of 1853 the first Dennison, Howard, & Davis watches were offered for sale to the public.
Based upon the experience of earlier failed trials, Howard and Dennison eventually perfected and patented their precision watch making machines and create the American System of Watch Manufacturing. In 1851 they moved to a new factory across the street from Howard's clock factory. They initially outfitted space for design and manufacturing in Howard's clock factory in Roxbury, Massachusetts, a community neighboring Boston. not the serial number on the external case.In 1849 Aaron Lufkin Dennison, Edward Howard and David Davis formed a company with a plan to use machinery to manufacture watch movement parts so precisely that they would become fully interchangeable.
Your movement serial number may not be in exactly the same location as the one in the photo, but you are looking for the serial number that is on the watch mechanism itself. You usually have to take the back off the watch case to see the movement serial number which may appear anywhere on the watch movement. Cases and watches were often made by different companies and each usually has its own serial number. not the serial number from the watch case. the working part with the wheels and gears.
You must use the serial number from the MOVEMENT of the watch. Since your serial number falls between those two numbers, you know that your watch was made in 1917 or 1918.
Looking at the table of Waltham serial numbers (see example below), you can see that number 20,900,000 was made in 1917 and 21,800,000 was made in 1918 (marked in red in the table below). Note that we're using the serial number from the watch movement, not from the watch case. Let's say you have a Waltham watch with serial number 21,607,210 as shown in the photo below. So to determine when your watch was manufactured, you will need to find where your serial number fits within the range of numbers. that would make some really long pages! Our serial number tables list RANGES of serial numbers. Many watch companies made hundreds of thousands of watches, and some companies made millions of watches! It would be impractical to list the individual serial numbers of EVERY watch made. Can't find YOUR exact serial number in our lookup tables?
Most vintage Swiss pocket watches did NOT have serial numbers and can't be dated by this method.
Some American watch brands did not use a consistent series of serial numbers, but most of the big manufacturers did. Not all vintage watches can be dated using the serial number. You should consult the serial number table for the specific brand of watch movement you are trying to date by selecting a company from the menu on the left. The example below uses information from the American Waltham Watch Company, but that is just an example. This page contains INSTRUCTIONS for using the serial number look-up tables that are found on many of our watch company history pages.
Determine the Age of your Vintage Pocket Watch How to Use our Vintage Watch Serial Number & Date Lookup Tables Instructions for using our serial number look-up tables