I was musing on Fabrizio's amazing reconstruction of an old "Swiss Counterfeit" while cleaning up a "NOS" condition model 5, 16s "simple simon" 7 Jewel Elgin from 1894 . . . TOTAL reliability and Simplicity! About the same time that Ingersoll . . .

copies Elgin's beautiful expression of mechanical simplicity in timekeeping with a questionable (at best) "low cost" watch!

So not too long after that Elgin produces their incredibly successful "three finger bridge" model . . .

This time you can even use an Elgin dial on your Ingersoll 3-finger copy, or was that "New York Standard", or "Trenton", or, or, . . . and some think the Swiss counterfeiters were the "bad guys"?