It was 1876 and the United States was celebrating the nation's first centennial in Philadelphia, in a 285-acre park on the outskirts of the first capital. Among the nine million visitors there was also a small delegation of Swiss watchmakers who came to visit the pavilion of the flourishing American watchmaking. And what they saw worried them greatly. In Switzerland, the manufacture of watches took place in small workshops where the work was done by hand, and the production was about a thousand expensive watches a year. In the USA, on the other hand, manufacturing took place in large factories, with machinery operated by workers with no particular qualifications, which produced interchangeable parts and made it possible to produce hundreds of thousands of inexpensive finished pieces. The Swiss delegation returned home and warned the watchmakers that they must change or perish: produce in the American way or disappear. The Swiss learned the American lesson so well that, within a few decades, the watches of the Alpine republic would obliterate the American watch industry.
But today Americans are also resurgent in the field of watch making. Money and know-how have turned to this sector and, even if the production scale is still small, the growth potential is great. For now it is limited to the design and assembly, while the parts are still Swiss. But some companies, for example Kobold, also manufacture the parts and come to offer the market watches with a domestic content of 80-90%. Other American companies active in watchmaking are Xetum, Bozeman Watch Co. and RGM Watch Co.
