The story of Ingersoll – From the watch that made the dollar famous to today

Tags: About the brand | Ingersoll

22.8.2022 | 7 MIN | 2x comment

Looking for a watch that will turn many, many heads? That's exactly what watches from Ingersoll are. Are you looking for a watch that may not be so well known today, but has a long history? That's also what Ingersoll watches are like. Let's take a closer look at this at least interesting brand.

As already stated, most of you probably don't know the name Ingersoll. But in fact they were more than famous once (mainly in America). You may have heard the term "one dollar watch". Well, that's all Ingersoll. But today it is a different brand, with a different focus and targeting a different clientele. But you know what? Let's start right from the beginning.

How the sons of a Michigan farmer founded America's oldest watch factory

And that beginning was in 1882, when two brothers, Charles and Robert Ingersoll, founded a company with cheap products in New York. From the beginning, it wasn't even watches, but cutlery, toys, bicycles, stamps, stamps and other small things. And it didn't take them long to find out that finding a cheap watch is quite a challenge.

At that time, watches were mostly made entirely by hand and were quite expensive. Not everyone could afford them and they were considered to be a sign of the upper class. Efforts to make cheap watches were nevertheless in full swing and for example the Waterbury Clock company supplied the Jumbo model to the market, which was just a cheaper alternative to more expensive European watches. And Ingersoll saw an opportunity.

They decided to cooperate. Waterbury Clock will make the watches, Ingersoll will sell them. In 1892, the Ingersolls ordered a large order of 10,000 watches from them. The sales strategy was simple - to offer functional, universal, but as affordable as possible watches. And this strategy paid off. The first watch that Ingersoll started selling was called the Universal.

The demand grew and soon the idea for a watch that went down in history was born.

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The watch that made the dollar famous

They were called Yankees and cost just $1 so any man could buy them for an average day's wages. This was 1896. As you can imagine, dollar watches sold themselves. Their low price was also due to the fact that they had no or only one stone, were mass-produced (thanks to Henry Ford) and sold in plain boxes.

But despite their commonness and low cost, they were functional watches that gained a reputation as reliable and accurate watches. And thanks to that, they became very popular. Hundreds of thousands to millions of them were sold annually, and Waterbury produced roughly 8,000 watches a day for Ingersoll. Ingersoll managed not only the distribution, but also unified the price of the watches in all stores.

The popularity of Ingersoll was also raised by Theodore Roosevelt, who told how he was called "The man from the country where Ingersoll watches were made" on one of his expeditions in Africa.

In the new millennium, Ingersoll expanded into England. He settled in London and sold one-dollar watches under the name Crown. They cost 5 shillings, which exactly corresponded to one dollar.

They did well in England. At first, parts were imported, but production for the local market soon moved to England. However, Ingersoll also bought other companies, the Trenton and the New England Watch Company. (Fun fact, just as a reference to the collaboration with Trenton, Ingersoll also released an interesting limited edition with a Swiss movement.)

Ingersoll was the first to come up with a pocket watch with a luminous dial called the Radiolite. Photo: analogshift.com

It was a golden era for Ingersoll. In those 20 years or so, Ingersoll sold around 40 million one-dollar watches. But he had about 10 different models in his offer and it seemed that the business would only flourish. According to Ingersoll, their watches were worn by Mark Twain, T. A. Edison, Charles Chaplin, Mahatma Gandhi, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and two were found even in the wreck of the Titanic.

Gandhi declared his Ingersoll pocket watch to be one of the most valuable possessions for accurate timekeeping. Today, you can find the watch in the New Delhi Museum. James Dean's Ingersoll watch was again a witness to his tragic accident.

But then came the First World War, followed by the recession. The crisis rocked Ingersoll to its foundations, and they showed to be quite fragile. In 1921 came the bankruptcy.

The Waterbury Clock company bought Ingersoll (which we also know from the history of the Timex brand) in 1922. In the 1930s, a watch with Mickey Mouse (which is said to be worn by the fictional character Dr. Langdon from The Da Vinci Code) appeared on the market under the Ingersoll-Waterbury brand.

The first watch with Mickey Mouse came in 1933 and it saved the Ingersoll-Waterbury company from bankruptcy.

And then the history gets a little less interesting. Waterbury Clock sold its London branch to Ingersoll in 1930, making it an English business. After the Second World War, the British company Ingersoll Ltd. merged with Smiths Industries Ltd. and Vickers Armstrong, and among the most interesting watches produced at that time are models with dials of comic characters.

Ingersoll withdrew from this joint business in 1969. And then came the quartz crisis, which put almost the final nail in the coffin.

And yet you can still buy Ingersoll watches today. Steven Strauss bought the brand in 1983, today all rights belong to the Zeon company - the British branch of the Hong Kong company Gerald Group, which is the largest distributor of watches in Great Britain. And that gracefully brings us to the present day of the Ingersoll brand, which is... different than before.

Ingersoll today. Kitsch or interesting mechanics?

When I searched for opinions on current Ingersoll watches, I found controversy and only controversy. So what is the quality of Ingersoll watches really?

In my opinion, watch lovers have to condemn the brand even before they take a good look at the watch. Maybe it's justified, but maybe it's a short-sighted view. On the one hand, I get it. There really is nothing left of the historical ties. The American Ingersoll is dead and it can be said that the current owner is only using the historical brand name.

Especially since the watches are assembled in China and some movements are... yes, Chinese. And so it is an unpleasant truth that, initially, the quality of Ingersoll watches was really not as good.

Since the 1970s, Ingersoll has been producing quartz watches, and at the end of the 1990s, the idea came to bring mechanical watches back to life. From the beginning, Ingersoll used over 100 types of movements, mainly Chinese production, e.g. Liaocheng or Hangzhou. Today it focuses on mechanical watches with only a few movements mainly from the Japanese Miyota and the Chinese manufacturer Sea-Gull.

But as we know, today the rule that what is Chinese is not good is no longer valid. It is often even of similar quality to European production, but at a fraction of the price. And this also applies to watch movements. The quality of Ingersoll movements and watches has gone up in recent years, and today you can find rather satisfied reviews of customers who succumbed to the interesting design of the watches.

It is true that the design is really elaborate. Sumptuous, one could even say that the watch feels much more expensive than what it sells for. While it looks a bit exaggerated in the product photos, they can surprise in real life.

Previously, the German distributor of the brand, Werner Kwiatkowski, was behind the design, but from 2015, the management decided that the design will again be done directly by Ingersoll. You can judge for yourself how they are doing.

They mainly focus on skeleton watches, or at least with an open heart. Even if you find exceptions that tend to change the shape of the case to other watchmaking legends...

And about those machines. It should be added that outside of the Chinese destination (Sea-Gull), Ingersoll uses movements from Japanese Miyota. Sometimes you will come across a few models with movements from Seika (NH35) or Swiss Made movements in some limited editions (Precidrive from ETA).

Jak tedy nahlížet na hodinky Ingersoll? So, how to view an Ingersoll watch?

Of course, it depends on what you are actually looking for. If you want a high-end watch with the "European-made" stamp, Ingersoll is definitely not the brand to go for. However, if you are fascinated by skeleton watches, where you can see a working movement, you don't want to pay a fortune for the watch and you can put up with detailed decoration, Ingersoll will be your cup of tempting juice.

But watches are not "only" about the movements, but also about the materials used. Here, Ingersoll adheres to the now common standard and manufactures the watch from quality 316L surgical steel. If they have any color treatment, it will be PVD. And they even dared to go into models made of today's connoisseur's favorite bronze. These are usually limited editions that are also connected to some sort of a story.

For glasses, you will most often encounter a hardened mineral, and the water resistance is usually adapted to the focus of the models. For elegant models it is 50 meters, for sports models it is usually 100 meters.

Ingersoll probably (most likely) will not be to everyone's taste. Distinctive decoration, open views at the movement, mechanical movements, often high cases... For some, it will simply be too much. But that's their selling point, and the reason people will curiously turn their heads after them.

What's definitely likable about Ingersoll is that it has clearly defined the direction it wants to go in the modern history of the brand, it's not afraid to do things its own way, and it offers its customers something interesting and original at affordable prices.

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