Elgin Stainless Steel Wristwatch and Expandable Band, AS IS. Round face with numbers, the number 6 covered by a circular secondhand timer with ten second increments. 

We cannot guarantee the working condition of any timepiece. 

Size: 1 3/8 x 4 in. 

The Elgin National Watch Company, commonly known as Elgin Watch Company, was a major watchmaker in the United States from 1864 to 1968. The company was first incorporated as the National Watch Company in Chicago, Illinois, by Philo Carpenter, Howard Z. Culver, Benjamin W. Raymond, George M. Wheeler, Thomas S. Dickerson and W. Robbins. They quickly convinced seven of the top watchmaker’s from the Waltham Watch Company in Massachusetts to come work for them, bringing their innovative designs and experience to make the company an immediate success. After moving in 1866 to a new factory site in Elgin, some 30 miles northwest of Chicago, the company sold watches under the names Elgin, Lord Elgin, and Lady Elgin, and for nearly 100 years the company’s manufacturing complex there was the world’s largest site dedicated to watchmaking. The company officially changed its name to the Elgin National Watch Company in 1874, as the Elgin name had become a common shorthand usage throughout the country for their watches. The company built the Elgin National Watch Company Observatory in 1910 to maintain scientifically precise times in their watches, and built additional plants in Aurora, Illinois and Lincoln, Nebraska in the 1920s and 30s. During World War II the company halted all civilian manufacturing and moved into the defense industry, making military watches, chronometers, fuses for artillery shells, altimeters, and other aircraft instruments and sapphire bearings used for aiming cannons. In 1963 the company relocated most manufacturing operations to a new plant in Blaney, a town near Columbia, South Carolina, which renamed itself Elgin, South Carolina in their honor. The original, obsolete factory in Elgin closed in 1964 after having produced almost half of all the pocket watches ever manufactured in the United States up to that point. The plant, including its iconic clock tower, was razed in 1966. The company discontinued all US manufacturing in 1968 and sold the rights to the name “Elgin,” which were subsequently resold multiple times over the years. The rights eventually were purchased by MZ Berger Inc. in the early 2000s, which manufactures its watches in China and distributes them outside traditional watch dealerships.

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