īy 1910, word of Elgin’s obsession with precision had spread around the world. Raymond.” The watch was exquisite: Elgin National Watch Company was born. After a year of designing and building the lathes and machines to achieve seemingly impossible levels of precision, a team of watchmakers and mechanical engineers produced their first pocket watch movement, named for mayor “B.W. Raymond, purchased an abandoned farm 30 miles north of Chicago and built a watch factory there. Harper’s magazine summed their sentiment perfectly: “It was the genuine, audacious, self-reliant Western spirit.” By August of that year this consortium, including then-Chicago mayor Benjamin W. In the spring of 1864 half a dozen ambitious Chicago businessmen decided that if Massachusetts could build a factory that built watches – Illinois could, too.
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