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HAMILTON 940

IN THE WATCH - PERFECTLY ACCURATE

RELIABLE - DURABLE - BEST

THE TIFFANY JEWELRY STORE, JEWELERS

XENIA OHIO

WE EMPAHTICALLY RECOMMEND AND GUARANTEE

THE HAMILTON

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THE HAMILTON WATCH

RAILROAD TIMEKEEPER

OF AMERICA

LANCASTER, PA

MEASURES ABOUT 8.5cm X 11.5cm

CIRCA 1930 - 1940

POST DEPRESSION ERA / WWI ERA

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FYI

 

Louis Comfort Tiffany (February 18, 1848 – January 17, 1933) was an American artist and designer who worked in the decorative arts and is best known for his work in stained glass. He is the American artist most associated with the Art Nouveau and Aesthetic movements. Tiffany was affiliated with a prestigious collaborative of designers known as the Associated Artists, which included Lockwood de Forest, Candace Wheeler, and Samuel Colman. Tiffany designed stained glass windows and lamps, glass mosaics, blown glass, ceramics, jewelry, enamels and metalwork.

Early life

Tiffany was the son of Charles Lewis Tiffany, founder of Tiffany and Company; and Harriet Olivia Avery Young. He attended school at Pennsylvania Military Academy in Chester, Pennsylvania, and Eagleswood Military Academy in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. His first artistic training was as a painter, studying under George Inness and Samuel Colman in New York City and Leon Bailly in Paris.

Tiffany started out as a painter, but became interested in glassmaking from about 1875 and worked at several glasshouses in Brooklyn between then and 1878. In 1879, he joined with Candace Wheeler, Samuel Colman and Lockwood de Forest to form Louis Comfort Tiffany and Associated American Artists. Tiffany's leadership and talent, as well as his father's money and connections, led this business to thrive.

In 1881 Tiffany did the interior design of the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, which still remains, but the new firm's most notable work came in 1882 when President Chester Alan Arthur refused to move into the White House until it had been redecorated. He commissioned Tiffany, who had begun to make a name for himself in New York society for the firm's interior design work, to redo the state rooms, which Arthur found charmless. Tiffany worked on the East Room, the Blue Room, the Red Room, the State Dining Room and the Entrance Hall, refurnishing, repainting in decorative patterns, installing newly designed mantelpieces, changing to wallpaper with dense patterns and, of course, adding Tiffany glass to gaslight fixtures, windows and adding the opalescent floor to ceiling glass screen in the Entrance Hall.

A desire to concentrate on art in glass led to the breakup of the firm in 1885 when Tiffany chose to establish his own glassmaking firm that same year. The first Tiffany Glass Company was incorporated December 1, 1885 and in 1902 became known as the Tiffany Studios.

In the beginning of his career, Tiffany used cheap jelly jars and bottles because they had the mineral impurities that finer glass lacked. When he was unable to convince fine glassmakers to leave the impurities in, he began making his own glass. Tiffany used opalescent glass in a variety of colors and textures to create a unique style of stained glass. This can be contrasted with the method of painting in enamels or glass paint on colorless glass that had been the dominant method of creating stained glass for hundred of years in Europe. (The First Presbyterian Church building of 1905 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is unique in that it uses Tiffany windows that partially make use of painted glass.) Use of the colored glass itself to create stained glass pictures was motivated by the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement and its leader William Morris in England. Fellow artists and glassmakers Oliver Kimberly and Frank Duffner, founders of the Duffner and Kimberly Company and John La Farge were Tiffany's chief competitors in this new American style of stained glass. Tiffany, Duffner and Kimberly, along with La Farge, had learned their craft at the same glasshouses in Brooklyn in the late 1870s.

In 1893, Tiffany built a new factory called the Stourbridge Glass Company, later called Tiffany Glass Furnaces, which was located in Corona, Queens, New York. In 1893, his company also introduced the term Favrile in conjunction with his first production of blown glass at his new glass factory. Some early examples of his lamps were exhibited in the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. At the Exposition Universelle (1900) in Paris, he won a gold medal with his stained glass windows The Four Seasons.

The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, Florida houses the world's most comprehensive collection of the works of Louis Comfort Tiffany, including Tiffany jewelry, pottery, paintings, art glass, leaded-glass windows, lamps, and the Tiffany Chapel he designed for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. After the close of the exposition, a benefactor purchased the entire chapel for installation in the crypt of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, New York in New York City. As construction on the cathedral continued, the chapel fell into disuse, and in 1916, Tiffany removed the bulk of it to Laurelton Hall. After the 1957 fire, the chapel was rescued by Hugh McKean, a former art student in 1930 at Laurelton Hall, and his wife Jeannette Genius McKean, and now occupies an entire wing of the Morse Museum which they founded. Many glass panels from Laurelton Hall are also there; for many years some were on display in local restaurants and businesses in Central Florida. Some were replaced by full-scale color transparencies after the museum opened.

A major exhibit at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art on Laurelton Hall opened in November 2006. An exhibit at the New-York Historical Society in 2007 featured new information about the women who worked for Tiffany and their contribution to designs credited to Tiffany. In addition, since 1995 the Queens Museum of Art has featured a permanent collection of Tiffany objects, which continues Tiffany’s presence in Corona, Queens where the company's studios were once located.

Significant collections of Tiffany windows outside the United States are the 17 windows in the former Urskine and American United Church, now part of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal, Canada, and the two windows in the American Church in Paris, on the Quai d'Orsay, which have been classified as National Monuments by the French government; these were commissioned by Rodman Wanamaker in 1901 for the original American Church building on the right bank of the Seine.

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The Hamilton Watch Company was established in 1892 after Keystone Standard Watch Company was purchased from bankruptcy. During the same year, Aurora Watch Company of Illinois also merged into Keystone. The new company was named after James Hamilton, owner of a large tract of land which was granted to him from William Penn and included what is now the city of Lancaster.

During the expansion of the railroads in the US, Hamilton maintained over 56% of the market. Railroads purchased all of Hamilton's production. As the market switched from pocket watches to wrist watches after World War I, the company manufactured wrist watches. During World War II, Hamilton retooled its business model to serve the military, dropping its consumer products.

Hamilton Watch Company was housed on a 13-acre (53,000 m2) complex in Lancaster. Hamilton eventually took possession of Aurora Watch Company's machinery shortly after incorporation.

The first watch made under the Hamilton name was an 18-size 17-jewel pocket watch in 1893. During Hamilton's first fifteen years, only two size movements were produced — the 18-size and the smaller 16-size.

The company's first series of pocket watches, the Broadway Limited, was marketed as the "Watch of Railroad Accuracy," and Hamilton became popular by making accurate railroad watches. Hamilton introduced its first wristwatch in 1917, designed to appeal to men entering World War I and containing the 0-sized 17-jewel 983 movement originally designed for women's pendent watches. In 1928 Hamilton purchased the Illinois Watch Company for in excess of $5 million from the heirs of John Whitfield Bunn and Jacob Bunn. Some of the most collectible early Hamilton wristwatches include The Oval, The Tonneau, The Rectangular, The Square Enamel, The Coronado, The Piping Rock, The Spur, The Glendale, The Pinehurst, The Langley, The Byrd, The Cambridge, the Barrel "B" and The Flintridge. Many models came in both solid gold and gold filled cases and, though rare, some wristwatches such as the Grant were made of silver.

Marine chronometers - railroad grade

During World War II, production of consumer watches was stopped, with all watches manufactured being shipped to troops. More than one million watches were sent overseas. The company was extremely successful in producing marine chronometers and deck watches in large numbers to fill the needs of the United States Navy, and other Allied navies as well. The Model 21 Hamilton was built first and had a chain drive fusee and then followed by the Model 22, this model had a traditional main spring this was in a traditional double box and in a deck watch. The Model 21 & 22 had a two day power reserve and the movements of both were marked U.S. Navy Bureau of Ships. The model 22 was also used by the U.S. Army and on the back of some it is marked U.S. Army, but all the model 22 movements are marked U.S. Navy Bureau of Ships. The Model 23 was a 16 size pocket watch case with a black dial, but this was a stop watch. The Model 4992b was in a 16 size case, black dial and was the pocket watch for U.S. military, the movement was 21 jewel railroad grade.

1950´s the last decade as a watch manufacturing powerhouse in America

In 1951, Hamilton rebuffed a hostile takeover bid by the Benrus watch company. The fallout from the failed takeover action culminated in Hamilton Watch Co. v. Benrus Watch Co. (206 F.2d 738, 740 (2d Cir. 1953), a Federal proceeding that is considered to be landmark in the realm of Federal anti-trust case law.

In 1957, Hamilton introduced the world's first electric watch, the Hamilton Electric 500. It was available in a variety of non-traditional asymmetrical case styles including the Ventura.

In 1962, Hamilton entered into a joint venture (60% owned by Hamilton) with the Japanese watchmaking firm Ricoh to produce electric watches meant primarily for the Japanese market. The electronic components were produced at Hamilton's Lancaster factory while production of the mechanical works and final assembly was undertaken in Japan. Although production levels of Hamilton-Ricoh watches was high (over 1000 per month), demand was low and consequently, the Hamilton-Ricoh partnership was unable to compete with the substantial market presence of Seiko. The partnership was dissolved in 1965, with the remaining Hamilton-Ricoh electronic movements (marked "Ricoh 555E") re-cased as "Vantage" and sold in the U.S.

Joint Swiss/U.S. operations: 1969–1972

In 1966, Hamilton acquired the Buren Watch Company in Switzerland, including all factories and technologies that had been developed by Buren up to that point. From 1966 to 1969, Hamilton Lancaster and Buren Switzerland were operated as a joint concern, with Hamilton using a number of Swiss movements for their "American" watches and Buren utilizing a number of components manufactured by Hamilton Lancaster. It was during this time that Hamilton started to selectively incorporate the highly innovative Buren Micro-rotor (a.k.a. Micro Rotor/Micro-rotor) movement into small numbers of certain upper tier watches, in addition to their ordinary hand-wind and traditional automatic watches.

The Buren (now Hamilton/Buren) Micro-rotor was the first patented automatic wristwatch movement to eliminate the sizable external oscillating weight inherent to most automatic winding watches. Instead, it utilized a much smaller weight that was entirely integrated into the chassis of the movement. This design allowed for a substantially slimmer automatic watch that still retained a center sweep second hand. The Micro-rotor concept was also conceived by Universal Geneve for use in their famous Polerouter series of timepieces during this same time. The official title of "first Micro-rotor movement" is still in dispute amongst some horology aficionados, even though Buren patented their design in 1954 while Universal Geneve applied for their patent in May 1955.

In 1969, the Hamilton Watch Company completely ended American manufacturing operations with the closure of its factory in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, shifting the all manufacturing operations to the Buren factory in Switzerland.

From 1969 to 1972, all new Hamilton watches were produced in Switzerland by Hamilton's Buren subsidiary. In 1971, the Buren brand was returned to Swiss ownership and by 1972, the Buren-Hamilton partnership was dissolved and the factory liquidated, due to decreased interest and sales of the Hamilton-Buren product.

Transitional Hamilton Watches: 1970s–1990s

In 1971, the Omega & Tissot Holding Company Societe Suisse pour l'Industrie Horlogere (SSIH) purchased the Hamilton brand and utilized the Hamilton name for a number of branding efforts, including numerous quartz watches in the 1980s.

The Hamilton Watch Division became a subsidiary of HMW. The Hamilton Watch Company changed their name to HMW at the time they sold their Watch division to SSIH.

There has been much confusion as to who developed the Pulsar, the world's first digital watch. Some have said that watch division that today is known as Hamilton, was not involved in the development of the Pulsar; however, Hamilton's own website claims that they were the makers of the Pulsar LED digital watch.

Through the enforced merger of SSIH and ASUAG Groups in 1984, Hamilton become a subsidiary of The Swatch Group Ltd..

Hamilton modern day: 1990s–present

The Hamilton name brand is currently owned by The Swatch Group Ltd. Swatch Group Hamilton brand watches have grown increasingly popular. Modern Hamilton watches no longer use proprietary "in house" movements, instead using movements made by The Swatch Group's movement making subsidiary, ETA.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hamilton began a marketing campaign that resulted in a comeback. Vintage designs were coming back in style and Hamilton had a large portfolio of popular designs from the 1920s, 1930's, 1940's and 1950s from which to draw. Playing on this resurgence, Hamilton replicated several of these original designs, such as the Ardmore, Boulton, Cabot, Piping Rock, Spur, Wilshire, and the 1957 Hamilton Ventura. These reissued watches incorporate a modern Swiss-made quartz movement.

In 2007, Hamilton introduced special editions of the Ventura to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the introduction of the electric watch. For the U.S. market, stainless steel quartz and automatic versions were released with a production of 1,957 each; for the Asian market, yellow and rose gold plated Ventura models were released with a total production of 1,000 each.

In 2009, Hamilton released three new Ventura models to celebrate what would have been the 75th birthday of Elvis Presley. Presley wore a Ventura in the movie Blue Hawaii. The automatic PVD version is an updated design of the Ventura. 

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