This post is part of a series, Reading Time at HSNY, written by our librarian, Miranda Marraccini.

*Image 1: Illustration from an advertising pamphlet from the National School of Watchmaking, Chicago IL, 1927.*

It’s back to school this month for lots of kids and adults. While you might be busy stocking your kid’s backpack with trapper keepers and erasable pens (my references may be dated), watchmaking students are picking up their loupes and staking tools to get to work. But how do people learn to become watchmakers, clockmakers and watch repairers? What was horological education like in the recent past?

Here at the Horological Society of New York (HSNY), our library has advertising pamphlets, syllabi, and textbooks from watchmaking schools in Europe and America throughout the 20th century. Within the U.S., we have materials from no-longer-extant schools in New Jersey, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Missouri, California, Wisconsin, and Nebraska, demonstrating how widespread watchmaking education was at the time.

One of the more charming educational pamphlets I’ve located is Some of the Hundreds of Items which Cause a Watch to Stop, published by the Western Pennsylvania Horological Institute in Pittsburgh in the 1940s (image 2). The authors of the pamphlet, designed for watchmakers and conveniently hole-punched to fit in a three-ring binder, seem to know that its title may be daunting. “Don’t become alarmed,” they reassure their readers. “The list is much simpler than it seems at first reading.”

Indeed many of the directions are straightforward, such as “10. Does the guard pin appear in a straight line with safety roller?” and “77. Did you oil escape wheel teeth?” Some of the items on the list blame customers, as in “86. Failure to wind fully (ladies are especially prone to this).” Aside from its obviously practical use, the pamphlet also serves as an advertisement for the Western Pennsylvania Horological Institute and its “complete, modern, up-to-date experimental laboratory and research department,” where students can learn from a “pioneering” curriculum.

Whether Western Pennsylvania was indeed the “finest in the country,” as it calls itself, is up for debate. Another WPHI pamphlet from the 1940s includes the altered tagline “World’s Largest Watchmaking School” and targets women for recruitment, declaring “A new field for women!...It enables women to be financially independent whether married or single” (image 3).

In the horological hub of Lancaster, in the eastern part of the same state, the Bowman Technical School trained men and women into the 1970s in watchmaking, engraving, and jewelry work. Its historic building, which also contained a shop and an observatory, was recently purchased by the family of a jeweler who attended the school and has already been returned to a horological purpose as a Hamilton retail store. Image 4 shows the building in about 1910; image 5 shows the building in 2019.

In image 7, Bradley Polytechnic Institute in Peoria, Illinois shows off its Horological Department in front of “Horology Hall” in 1923. The class is stunningly large by today’s standards.

Pictures in the Bradley brochure show students engaged in different stages of the watchmaking process at long tables. “Elementary Watchwork” was one of six divisions, and students could specialize in just one, such as engraving or even optics, if they wanted to make eyeglasses instead of watches (image 8). The brochure specifies that women are admitted to all departments of study, and the list of students and graduates at the end demonstrates this, with entries like Mrs. Estella Hinkley of Illinois and Mrs. A. Lindsey of Nebraska. Indeed, the founder of Bradley Polytechnic was a woman, noted philanthropist Lydia Moss Bradley. There were also students from as far away as Korea, Syria, and New Zealand.

Just like many opportunities for technical education today, watchmaking schools of the 20th century advertised the speed and ease with which you could graduate and get a stable job, even during periods of economic distress. They touted watchmaking as a career with exceptional financial independence and security. To make their promises, school advertisements used testimonials from graduates as well as reprinted help wanted ads. In the early 1940s, a letter from the American School of Watchmaking president, Herbert W. Hartley, assures: “Yes, after the war is over, and fine watches and clocks are again available to the civilian market, there is expected to be a TREMENDOUS DEMAND for them…Just when the war will end is, of course, anyone’s guess. But when peace DOES COME, will YOU be prepared!” Indeed, the post-war period brought fresh opportunities, including the Joseph Bulova School of Watchmaking, which trained disabled veterans for a new career. I’ll be featuring Bulova and its influence on disability rights in a future article.

Hartley, at the American School of Watchmaking, uses abundant all-caps threats to scare prospective students into applying: “DON’T PUT IT OFF! Every day new opportunities are being offered to men qualified in this field…JOBS AND BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES that might have been YOURS had you started YOUR training sooner!” Other schools had different, gentler approaches to recruiting: in 1956, the Chicago School of Watchmaking offered a free watch to anyone who enrolled, and they could choose from different men’s and women’s models (image 9).

Schools in desirable cities also used their location as a selling point, as is visible in the not-entirely-relevant images of men and women in bathing suits from the 1940s and 1950s (images 10 & 11) printed in California watchmaking school recruitment materials. Perhaps not surprisingly, the American School of Watchmaking in Los Angeles particularly exploited this angle in their advertising.

Students who couldn’t make it to Los Angeles or any of the American watchmaking schools could enroll in the 20th-century equivalent of online classes: correspondence courses. In a correspondence course, the student would receive syllabi and lessons by mail, which meant there was a lot of paper involved. As a result, much more of the coursework survives in our library. (For in-person courses, handwritten notebooks are often the only surviving materials. You can see some beautiful examples of student work in one of my earlier posts.)

The DeSelms Watch School (images 12 & 13) was a “Home Course” established in 1903. An advertisement in 1913 in Popular Mechanics promises: “after you complete the course you will know a watch from A to Z.” The course took about 30 weeks to complete, although students could set their own pace. Tuition included the loan of a lathe, and students were responsible for acquiring their own beginner set of tools.

Just like Bradley, in its pamphlet, DeSelms advertises its appeal to international learners, even including a photograph of one Gonzalo Quinones, a student from Costa Rica (image 14). And like modern distance learning programs, DeSelms touts its flexibility and accessibility, so that students who are currently employed or have other responsibilities can learn on their own schedule.

The De Selms brochure urges readers to make a change in their lives, dismissing all obstacles: “You may think you live too far away…You may think you haven’t enough spare time…Stop doubting. If you are going to succeed you are going to act…The DeSelms school makes everything easy for you, no matter who you are, or where you live.” There is an inclusive impulse to distance courses, then as now, which attempt to remove barriers to hardworking people who want to start a new career. These days you can still learn watchmaking and watch repair through distance learning, including in a British Horological Institute program.

Today, HSNY continues the tradition of helping students overcome barriers to succeed as watchmakers. We assist watchmaking students by offering eight different scholarships, some of which are designed for students from underrepresented backgrounds in the field. If you’re thinking about a career in watchmaking, we encourage you to dip your toe in with one of our classes, which are built for absolute beginners. We too believe that “no matter who you are, or where you live,” you can become a watchmaker. So stop doubting, and get to work!