An Amazing Silent Film From 1931 At The American Elgin Watch Factory Shows Just How Advanced Automated Watchmaking Was

Long before CNC, sophisticated automatic milling machines capable of over a hundred operations, powered production of five thousand watches per day.

Watch connoisseurship is all about the appreciation of the beauty and ingenuity found in very small machines and yet there is surprisingly little general knowledge in the enthusiast community about how watches are actually made, and how they were made before the widespread adoption of CNC and other modern computer controlled machining techniques. There has been preserved, however, a film which was made in 1931, which shows just how incredibly sophisticated and how highly automated watchmaking had become, long before CNC machines came on the scene, and it is an astonishing document that will completely rewrite how you think about watch manufacturing.