What you see below was first published the Hamilton Watch Company more than eighty years ago. I think it says a lot about us and our love of timekeepers today. Perhaps it will also give us something to think about...


The Timekeeper

To railroad men, explorers, and men engaged in scientific pursuits, accurate time is a necessity. To others it is a convenience. Yet the majority of people in all walks of life desire accurate time quite as much as those whose work depends upon it. No one deliberately chooses a poor timekeeper in preference to a good one, although people frequently fail to secure accuracy for the reason that in buying a watch their attention is wholly fixed upon its outward appearance.

It is not the value of time that makes people want their watches accurate. No matter how much money per minute the time of a business man might be worth, he would lose nothing in efficiency by having a watch that was three seconds fast. The reason for wanting an accurate timekeeper strikes deeper than that. For a watch actually has a direct psychological effect on the individual who carries it. A man and his watch go through life together. He is more closely associated with it-the companion of his working and sleeping hours-than with any other mechanical object.

A watch becomes a part of a man's character. It is the guardian of his habits, the critic of his wasted moments-a supplement to his conscience almost, as it ticks away one after another the hours and minutes of which his whole life is made.

It is not to be wondered at, then, that every man feels a personal pride in the possession of a timekeeper of phenomenal accuracy. From it he learns the true value of time-to hoard it jealously and to make the utmost use of it.


The Hamilton Watch
Every One a Masterpiece
The Watch of Railroad Accuracy

“As if you could kill time,” remarked Thoreau in Walden in 1854, “without injuring eternity.”