In Conversation With Cornell Watch Company CEO John Warren
Recently, its seems like there are new watch brands popping up every day. Often, there doesn’t seem to be much to distinguish one brand from another. But every once in a while there is a brand that differentiates itself from the pack. One such brand is Cornell Watch Company. Cornell is not a new brand per-se. The Chicago-based brand existed for a short time in the 1870s, creating pocket watches geared towards railroad workers. The brand would eventually move west to California, and shortly thereafter, close down.
One would think that might be the end of the brand. However, in 2024 Chicago native John Warren, a lawyer and avid watch collector, would reestablish the brand. While keeping true to the design and heritage of the original Cornell Watch Company, Warren updated the watch, creating a modern, but classic, wristwatch with top-notch specs and finishing.
I had the chance to sit down with John to discuss Cornell’s history and the relaunch of the brand as well as his personal watch collecting journey and interest in pocket watches. Below is a transcription of the interview. You can also watch the full video here.
You can learn more about the Cornell Watch Company and the 1870CE at their website.
Craig Karger (Wrist Enthusiast): Today we're going to talk a little bit, not only about Cornell Watch Company, but his collecting journey because it's pretty unique. I think you have one of the more unique collections that I've seen recently and it's a lot different from what everyone else collects. So let's first get into your watch collecting journey. How did you get into collecting watches and I guess really pocket watches?
John Warren (Cornell Watch Company): Yeah, so like many people, I was first exposed to watches. So my uncles both gifted me watches. One was on tour in Iraq and he picked up a bunch of really interesting vintage watches from Russia and from Europe. And my other uncle gifted me a Orca Citizen, one of the original ones. And it was always, growing up, it was always far too big for my wrist. And so it really acted as a side table clock for most of my life growing up. Yeah, it was huge, but I loved it and I eventually grew into it and I still wear it today and my dad always wore a James Bond Seamaster and I just thought it was so cool and I love the movies and so watches had always been on my mind. And when I went to college I was gifted a Seamaster and it felt far too nice for my 18-year-old self, but I still wear that. It's probably my favorite watch. The pocket watches came into play when I was in college. I had caught the collecting bug, but frankly, being on a college budget, a lot of the watches that you like are hard to get. And also the independent brand, micro brand scene hadn't really developed in the way it has now where there's a ton of interesting stuff. So I came to find that the Cornell Watch Company was only a few miles south of the University of Chicago where I went.
CK: And you're Chicago born and bred. Are you still there now?
JW: Still there now. Okay. Yeah. So I went to college there, did law school there and we plan on staying there. We love Chicago and I think that's a big part about why we wanted to revive Cornell. It's not just that the pocket watches were some of the best railroad grade pocket watches of the day. Much of it has to do with the fact that there's such a tie to Chicago.
And not Hyde Park in the south side, but all of Chicago. So that's what drew me into the pocket watches. I love the history of it. They're much more affordable and they resonated with me because I like collecting. And so it wasn't just about wearing them, it was about having them. And you can see here on the mat, there's some that are not cased. And so that was also an interesting journey too, is when you get these pocket watches, they're not always running. They're not always perfect. So a lot of this, it's working on refurbishing a car.
CK: So you've been refurbishing some of these watches?
JW: Very loosely. Not the movements. If the movements are not working, they get serviced. But all of the pocket watches we have do work. We try to run them every other month or so. They are like antiques. So they're not meant to run all the time, but they all work. In terms of our capabilities of putting them back together, it's movements, dials. We try to find period correct hands if they didn't have them. But you can see here there's one example here where that's a side project that we need to get to.
CK: How do you source these pocket watches? Is it eBay?
JW: All eBay. At the very beginning you would find them in lots, so you'd have to buy say 10 pocket watches to get the one Cornell. They weren't wildly popular, say 10 years ago. Since we've revived the brand, they become more popular. Prices have gone up some, but normally you'd have to buy them in a lot. There's a few that were sold through auction that we bought a couple that way, but it's mainly eBay.
I haven't met a ton of collectors with Cornells. I think that in circulation now, there's a lot of forms that keep track of the reference numbers. Right now the numbers are around a hundred are in circulation that people keep track of. So there's not a lot. They only made around 18,000. So we have, gosh now the number's gotten crazy. We have like 25 pieces. So I think we might have one of the larger collections if not the largest. And we try to collect all the different grades because what's different about pocket watches, and as you look at the table here, they all look very similar. And where they're different is in their movements and how they're named and whether or not they used rubies, how many jewels they have, did they use a patent regulator? That's where the collecting gets interesting. It's under the hood. It's not so much the dials.
CK: I had heard prior to, I guess, World War II that American-made pocket watches were the grade or the standard by which everyone else was judged. They were better than Swiss. And then once the war machine went into effect, they stopped producing them.
JW: Yeah, so it's interesting. What the Americans did really well was create lots of them and a lot of high-quality pieces at a reasonable price. What the Swiss did really well was finishing. The traditional Swiss techniques that we think about today, they did that really well pocket watches too. What the Americans did was they created the American system manufacturing, which was based on the assembly line that you would see with gun manufacturing. That's where it originally came from. And then it's rumored that Henry Ford went to the 1876 World's Fair and saw what they were doing with watches and ended up doing the assembly line for the model.
But what Americans did really well was that system. Mechanization, interchangeable parts. The Swiss at the same fair came and saw what Waltham was doing. And what we've read is they were shocked. And they brought it back home. And by the time the 1893 World's Fair rolled around, they had figured it out. But the Americans produced millions of watches and really high quality.
Waltham, Rockford, those were the big ones and they lasted the longest. The Cornell Watch Company only lasted six years. However, the employees from the company, the know-how, that continued on and had a big influence on not only American watchmaking but global.
CK: So I guess it makes sense to get a little background about the original Cornell Watch Company.
JW: Yeah, so the original Cornell Watch Company was created in 1870 by two individuals, Paul Cornell and J.C. Adams.
CK: Is there any relation to the college, Cornell?
JW: There is, yeah. We don't have a relation. However, Paul Cornell was Ezra Cornell's cousin. And interestingly enough, as the story goes, Paul Cornell was also an attorney. He showed up in Chicago 10 years after it was founded. So in 1847 he showed up and the first day he was there, he was staying at a hotel, he had his life savings stolen. So he wrote to Ezra and said, "Hey, can you send me some money? Everything I have was stolen." And Ezra replied, "There's no secure way to do that." And ultimately that conversation led to the creation of Western Union who Ezra Cornell was the founder of that.
So yeah, interesting story with that. But the watch company was an origin of Paul Cornell's vision to provide tools really for his new town and the railroad, which he provided a land grant for in order to build the town up.
Paul Cornell
And so Paul Cornell, after he came to Chicago in 1847, he got together with some other investors and they said, "Hey, the south side of Chicago, which at the time was really just a swamp land, could be a fantastic opportunity to invest." So seven miles south of the city, Paul Cornell created Hyde Park and it was modeled off the Hyde Park in London. So think really exclusive beach community, big lots. And he thought to grow it, the rail lines need to come to it.
And so he had a land grant for the Illinois Central Railroad and it was there at that intersection where the railroad came to town that he created the Cornell Watch Factory. And all of these watches are designed for railroad use. We have pocket watches ranging from seven jewels, which is pretty common all the way up to 19 jewels. The 19 jewels were finished with rubies. They had gold, they were adjusted for heat, cold, different movements. And interestingly on the higher end models, they also started to experiment with mixing metals on the balance wheel. The benefit of doing this in Chicago, the climate is extremely variable. And so in doing this, they're able to regulate to account for really cold and really hot. And for that, there were several news outlets at the time that said they had the best escapement in the US for railroad pocket watches.
CK: What makes a good railroad pocket watch?
It's interesting, it's complicated in 1870 because there wasn't a railroad standard yet. The railroad standard started to appear in the 1880s and it was based on each rail line had their own standard of what watches had to be. However, in the 1870s it was common that they would look for 15 jewel. The common accuracy was 30 seconds a week, which even today is very accurate.
And they had to use lever escapements so that the time wouldn't change without an action that was intended. So that was generally what it looked like. And then the 1880s real standards started to be adopted 'cause there were a series of train crashes that they knew that timekeeping was something that was paramount. And it's also I think important to remember that the time zones we have today were not in existence during the Cornell Watch Company. Those came in 1883. So as a result, having a pocket watch in your pocket is equivalent today like having an iPhone. It was a huge technological advance for the working man to be able to carry around time, which wasn't standardize and wasn't necessarily available to everyone.
CK: So what happened to the Cornell Watch Company?
JW: So ultimately the Cornell Watch Company in 1873 moved operations to California to San Francisco. And one of the pieces we have here is from San Francisco, it's made in what probably was around the last month of production, but they moved to San Francisco in search for cheaper labor. Two things happened in Chicago that prompted that move. The first being in 1871, the Chicago fire, and that decimated three to four miles of the city. The Cornell Watch factory survived. But the economy in the short term, especially for a startup company that had a lot of debt on the books, that was pretty devastating.
The second being the panic of 1873, which was a countrywide panic that originated from speculation of railroad investment. And many of the investors in Cornell, as you would imagine, were tied to the rail lines. So that was a blow for the company. And also Paul Cornell then had to take on most of the company stock. So he said to himself, okay, how can we cut costs? How can we continue to exist? California presented an interesting opportunity for that. One, there was cheaper labor, but two, the climate was better to make watches all year. It was an easier environment to make high quality watches. And so that only existed for three years and it got sold to the California watch company. But I do think that a lot of the legacy of Cornell continued to exist and you see that with the employees that left and some of the innovations that found their way to other companies and even worldwide.
CK: Okay. Is there anything that you can point to that we will recognize today?
JW: Yeah, so the assistant superintendent for Cornell, his name was P.H. Wheeler. He went on to work at Rockford and then ultimately ended up at the Osaka watch company as a manager. And he helped them usher in the first Japanese, fully domestically made pocket watch. And he used the same system that he used at Cornell with interchangeable parts and mechanization to do that. So much of the modern watchmaking industry, not only in Europe as we know from people coming over and seeing what Walton was doing, the assistant superintendent for Cornell ended up going to Japan to help them do that as well.
Some other examples too, the co-founder of Cornell, J.C. Adams, he's probably the most influential American watchmaker and entrepreneur that people have never heard of. J.C. Adams was known as the Great American starter, and he founded six pocket watch companies including Elgin. So he had a ton of know-how. He used to work on the rail lines and his position was keeping accuracy of timekeepers. He set up standards. So J.C. Adams influenced not only in Cornell, but then after Cornell was pretty big, specifically directly after his time at Cornell, he went to found Adams and Perry in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Adams and Perry would become Hamilton.
So he didn't found Hamilton. However, the factory that Hamilton existed in was the Adams and Perry factory. And a lot of the know-how he brought led to Hamilton being a success. And before Cornell, he also did Elgin. So he was very influential. The last person I would point out, and I wouldn't say it was necessarily a legacy, but they inherited a decent amount of legacy in terms of know-how was C.L. Kidder who was the co-founder of IWC with F.A. Jones, came back to the United States in 1872 and he found himself at the Cornell Watch Company and he worked with Paul Cornell to help build out some of the innovations that they had in their pocket watches. And here the movement that's sitting outside of a case- this is a C.L. Kidder. It's a relatively modest movement in that it's only seven jewels and as we talked about, the jewels go all the way up to 19 with the Paul Cornell model. But what's interesting about it is because it was only seven jewels and they only made it for a year, they're really rare. This is definitely a working man's pocket watch and it would've gotten use and that's probably why it's out of its case. It probably got banged around quite a bit. So these are really rare to find. There's probably only 10 or 15 that we know about from a reference number perspective. So we're really happy to have one of the movements and we hope to get it back together soon.
CK: So going back, you said you have about 25 different pieces. Are you just keeping them in your collection? Do you eventually want to sell them to collectors as well?
JW: So the ones where we have multiple grade references, there's no point in keeping all of them. If there's other passionate collectors in Cornell, we'd be happy to share love and sell them to other people. Right now, there just hasn't been a huge market for them. And so what we look for when we're collecting are really great examples of the different grades and then also the production numbers. So a lot of what we have here, for example, one of the J.C. Adams we have here was made in the first year at Cornell. And a lot of the movement finishing you see on it, you see that it evolves throughout the life of the company. So it's nice to have. The San Francisco variant that we have was made in the last months of the company. So we try to collect low serial number, different grade types. So we have all of them now. Not all of them are in great condition. As you can see, the C.L. Kidder, that's the only one we have. So we've got to bring that back to life.
CK: So when a new brand comes into the market, you either see something completely new or there's been a little bit of a trend for brands to be resuscitated. What made you go that route instead of just starting off your own brand?
JW: Sure. So the intention with this was never originally to have a mass market brand. Really we just wanted to create a wristwatch that we could wear every day, as we'll talk about in a little bit. We do carry round pocket watches that we collect, not Cornells. The Cornells are quite big, at an 18 size and they're very much so antiques. So we couldn't carry these around, but we did enjoy collecting them. And so our thought had always been could we bring a wristwatch? And it wasn't until we partnered with RGM that that vision was even possible. And there's a few reasons for that. One, we wanted to use an American producer, and two, we just did not have access to the supply chains necessary to do things in the same way the original Cornell Watch Company did, specifically using real Grandfoo enamel dials. There's only a few manufacturers in the world that can do them.
And so it was impossible to even bring one to life if we wanted to use an enamel dial. Having this level of hand finishing on the movements, which Cornell did, the original company did, was very hard to do. So for us, it was never meant to be originally mass market. It was just about creating a watch for us. And it really took, once we had the physicals, it took us working with RGM to try to figure out, okay, how can we scale this to make more watches and how can we bring back the brand? So it's always just been about trying to create something for us and now we hope it's other enthusiasts also enjoy it.
CK: Now, when you decided that you wanted to revive Cornell, was there any issues with getting the name?
JW: No. So fortunately it was in the public domain and we talked to people about this a lot. So we have the trademarks on it. That was one thing where, as a startup you try to keep costs in line. So you'll notice that we don't have really a marketing budget or not much of one. Our marketing budget is actually what we give to scholarships. Like the old Waltham Watch Company, I believe in the late 1800s, they gave around 6% of revenue to marketing. That's about what we give for scholarships. But getting the rice to the name and doing that right was something we did take seriously.
So we have the marks trademarked. It wasn't a terribly arduous process. And what I would say, and we talked to people about this, there where dozens of American brands that are defunct and they could be in your backyard. It was like, I would say it was like the.com bubble during the late 1800s, where this was a revolutionary thing to have in your pocket at a reasonable price. Having the time was not something that was commoditized. And so tons of brands popped up and they all had their niche, whether that was having the perfect escapement, and that was the goal of Cornells, whether that was having a dollar watch, whether that was having something that was highly decorated, these brands all had their certain thing and they existed all over the US, all way from literally Boston to California.
So I think for us, we were always just trying to honor the original company. We wanted to tell the story and we tell people this, it's not our history as a company. There is obviously 150 year gap, so it's not our history at all. But I do think that people, once they know about it, it will encourage them to think about American watchmaking differently and also hopefully start collecting. Maybe they revive a company that was in their backyard or they have an old pocket watch that's in their drawer that their great-grandfather gave to them. That's what we think is cool and that's why we talk about the history.
CK: How do you balance the sense of duty to stay true to the original Cornell while also forging your own identity and creating something new and modern.
JW: So that's challenging, and I think for any brand that would be challenging, but especially reviving an old brand where we never met ownership. And so you have to think about what was the goal of the original Cornell Watch Company. And I do think the goal was producing high quality timepieces for a specific purpose. These are all purpose-built watches. They've stood the test of time. And so we think about that a lot and that's why we use things like real enamel dials. That's why we went above and beyond on the micro rotor movement. That's why we do hand finishing. But I will say, and when you look at these pieces here, we have, this is our first prototype right here, and it is absolutely true to the original Cornell pocket watch.
That would be the example that it's based off of. And what you can see here is that it is literally a spitting image of it with the same hands. These hands are probably a better example.
Same hands, same exact logo. We did a full polish case and frankly it came out in a way that didn't aesthetically resonate with us in the same way that our final model did. We didn't think that it was modern enough. We think that adding the leaf style hands, having a more elaborate logo, balance the dial better, and using a mixed of brush and polish case showed the type of hand finishing that we're doing on the case. And so that's an example of where we did depart from the original design of the Cornell pocket watches. However, I do think for us and also a modern customer, it works better and the more success our watch has, the more visibility the original company has, and also our initiatives to help support American watchmaking.
CK: And the 1870CE is an automatic as opposed to a manual wind.
JW: That's right. So yeah, at the time the automatics weren't available in American produced pocket watches, but I do like the micro rotor gives you the full view of the movement, much alike the full plate movements of the original pocket watches.
CK: And that leads me into my next question. So RGM is an American watch movement manufacturer.
JW: They do make a movement, the 801, but they also make cases, they make dials, they do everything in-house. They do outsource for some stuff, but they make an effort to do everything in-house.
Our watch uses a Swiss Schwarz-Etienne movement, 86 hour power reserve, 33 jewel. There are not many mass-produced movement options in the US. Roland is obviously a great example of it. His movements take quite a while to make. They're all done by hand and finished by hand. And so those weren't available to us to use. I would've loved to use them. They're also a little bit bigger, so our case size is 39. You'll see his watches that have his in-house movement are a little bit larger. Obviously Josh Shapiro is making a great movement, but for a commercially available movement, it wasn't an option. So for us, we wanted to have hand finishing done by RGM, which we do. So we had to rely on the Swiss for our movement.
CK: Hopefully not forever.
JW: Well, that would be incredible, and I think that's one challenge with American watchmaking. There's many challenges with American watchmaking. There's no supply chain or virtually none. And so a lot of what we're doing to try to help support American watchmaking is rebuilding that supply chain. And we think that it starts with human capital. And so that's why for every watch we give $500 to HSNY, which is right around the corner from here to support American watchmakers. Right now it's estimated that there's a shortage of 4,000 watchmakers in the US alone
CK: And there's a shortage in Switzerland as well.
JW: In Switzerland too. We've seen there's more enthusiasm towards watchmaking in the US. From that perspective we've seen Rolex recently came into Texas and has a servicing school, but there's a lot that can be done, and I think it starts with getting good people and providing opportunities for people to go to watchmaking school. And so we spend a lot of time thinking about how we can help with that. And we think $500 a watch is a good start, but there's a ton to do.
CK: So how many watches are you making a year?
JW: Well, for this year we are limited to 15 pieces for the 1870 C.E. Those are all accounted for. Later this year we hope, barring capacity issues with suppliers or whatever it may be, that we can introduce another model where we should have production spun up by the end of the year on that model.
CK: Do you have a prototype already of the new model?
JW: We have have a vector of it. Yeah. So we don't have a physical prototype yet. It's going to just be a dial variant that we think works really well with the Roman numerals in our hand design and the case. But in terms of yearly production, we're around 25 to 50 units right now. If there's demand, if we can scale and scale, I mean these take quite a while to make. The movements take around eight months for us to get, then we hand finish everything. The enamel dials, we have one person that makes them. They have a high rejection rate around 20 to 30%.
So the ones that make it into the watch are the best of the best. And so it takes quite a while to make these watches. Our production capacity is around one to two a month right now. We have levers we can pull to increase that production, but right now, that's where we're limited to. So 25 to 50 units a year, but we hope to grow. And as there's more interest and we have more things like this, hopefully people can see what we're doing and trying to do for American watchmaking and have the opportunity to make more.
CK: Do you have plans for other models that are rather than just dial variations?
JW: Yeah. So we have stuff being prototyped right now, different case materials as well. Different kinds of cases too. So we do. Schwarz-Etienne is a fantastic movement manufacturer because their movement in a way, some other high-end brands use them as well. As you can see, it's sort of modular. So we can stick in two barrels here and have a crazy long power reserve for a manual wind watch. They also have a GMT, there's possibility of doing a GMT using the same movement architecture. So it's a great platform to build on without having to do a ton of R&D to reinvent the wheel.
So that's the low hanging fruit. There's a lot we can do with this movement manufacturer beyond just doing dial variance. We can do a lot of stuff with just manipulating what the movement's doing and having the same dimensions and understanding the movement architecture. What I would say is that we've had a lot of people ask us, "Why'd you end up using Schwarz-Etienne?" And that came from a place of Roland being a watchmaker, he's been at RGM for 30 years. We together looked at a number of different movements that could work with this, all high-end movements. And ultimately from a watchmaker's perspective, he thought the serviceability of this movement was better. He thought the robustness was better. Obviously the specs are great, we love the micro rotor.
But this was selected because a watchmaker evaluated it and said, "This is the best option for you guys", which we're really happy about because some people say it's not an ultra-thin, it's a 10 millimeter case. So people have asked, "Well, why do you use a thinner movement?" And the reason behind it is that we really like the durability, the robustness and serviceability of this movement.
We really like it. And we do think the micro rotor tips its hat to the full plate pocket watch movements where you can see everything.
CK: Why don't we take a look at some of your collection.
JW: We'll start with the Paul Cornell variant. Here you can see that we maintain the Roman numerals. However, the rest of it starts to depart quite a bit. This is double sunk. You can see the Alonga type of curving logo. And they also used their own logo, which was inherited by the California Watch Company, just below it with the initials of Cornell Watch Company. This is a stem winder, which was rather unique for the time. It was unique for Cornell. Cornell was credited with creating the first woman's stem wind pocket watch, which we think is pretty interesting. And so this represents a lot of R&D. The movement has real rubies, it has gold accents. So this is top of the line. This is the best Cornell you could get at the time. And these are rather hard to find.
The next one we have, which this one, we talk a lot about J.C. Adams. This is a J.C. Adams, relatively modest jewel count at only 11. But what's interesting is again, these watches look all very similar. Where you start to, at least for us, where we start to find things are really interesting, are in the movement finishing. But then also just understanding the stories of the people involved with the company. Here it's signed by J.C. Adams. You see Chicago, and this is a very low serial number. This one was probably made in the first months of the company.
This one here is, again, the dial looks very similar, but what's different is the movement and the movement finishing. This is a John Evans. John Evans was the namesake of Evanston Illinois and he was a co-investor in the Cornell Watch Company. So he found himself on the name of one of the grades. Paul Cornell would go on to marry his sister-in-law. So there is definitely a family connection, but here this is 15 jewel. You can see that the decoration is a little bit higher. You can see the balance here is a mix of steel and brass, so it better dealt with temperature changes. Then you start to see they're introducing things like here in the Chicago, different embellishments.
These embellishments are what inspired with our logo of the Fleur-de-Lis. The Fleur-de-Lis on our wristwatch is an embellishment that they use throughout the higher grades. So you'll see we need a macro lens here, but you'll see that on some of the letters to accent them, like the old English letters, you can see that the Fleur-de-Lis is present throughout and you start to see it on the 15 jewel grades, which are definitely railroad pocket watch grade. The last Cornell we have on the table, we have two if we count the movement. So we can talk about the C.L. Kidder really quick. We briefly touched on C.L. Kidder. He is a co-founder of IWC. He showed up and his name found its way on a seven jewel pocket watch.
Again, these are really rare. They were only made for a year, and because they were more working man's pocket watch, they didn't really survive. So we're really proud to have that. And that dial will probably go on. The reason I brought this is this is from 1870. This is a genuine Cornell dial. It basically looks new old stock. We use the same type of process for ours. Copper baseplate, apply different layers of powdered glass, fire it. We fire in the numerals the same way they did. I bring this because it's 150 years old and it looks brand new.
There's no oxidation. It's perfect. And so we hope that these Cornells in 150 years, if they're passed on, will look the same. They should. The last Cornell that we have here is from San Francisco and it signed San Francisco, which we think is interesting. The movement in it, which I think is the best part, is signed by the California Watch Company.
And so this was at the very end of the Cornell Watch Company. At this point they were already signing movements with the California Watch Company. And so this watch was probably produced based on its serial number in possibly the last month of existence for the Cornell Watch Company. The last pocket watch we have on the table is more, it's not a Cornell, it's a private label Waltham. And what I love... So our collecting that we do isn't just Cornells. We collect a ton of pocket watches. There are so many really interesting examples of American pocket watches that have really amazing stories at affordable prices.
This is a gold filled case. It's from the early 1900s. It was only 250 bucks on eBay. And the story goes that the watch is a private label. You can see on the dial it says Napa California, which is pretty unique for the time, for the early 1900s. So the story goes that the private label was done for a jewelry watchmaker in Napa, California. He came from Switzerland from the watchmaking region and from Switzerland, he also brought grapes. And so he was one of the first people to plant grapes in the Napa Valley near St. Helena. And he was also a watchmaker.
So it's almost as if he brought a little slice of Switzerland to America with him. And this is his private label watch that he did. And again, it's only a $250 watch. The history that's in this is incredible. And so this is just one example, and this is a watch that my wife does carry, not a daily carry, but it keeps great time. It's robust, it's pretty durable. We've had no problems with it. But again, this is an example of there's so much history and there's so many watches out there, millions, literally. And so our collecting journey has taken us down multiple paths. Obviously the Cornells, but we really love private labels. Private labels for us are cool because there's so much story behind not just the watch, but also the people involved. And this one, unlike the Cornells, uses a different movement finishing. Here we see they're using Damascening. And so what that means is they're using a nickel baseplate and then elaborating on it with these different designs. And so these look a little bit more ornate. And so we collect these as well.
CK: It's almost like perlage.
JW: It is. And this is a uniquely American style of finishing. Josh Shapiro, you'll see he does some of this. There's other brands in America that are bringing it back. We would love to introduce it to maybe the 1870 CE or additional models. It's something that's distinctly American. Instead of Geneva stripes you have Damascening like this, and we think it's beautiful.
CK: When you carry one of these around, do you wear a wristwatch at the same time?
JW: So I don't. When I carry this, it's generally with more formal attire. I don't have any waistcoats, so it's just in the pocket. Normally we'd attach something like this so that you don't lose it, but this is a 16 size, so this is a very modestly sized watch. It's not so modest that you could wear it on your neck like Taylor Swift style. But they did make actually smaller pocket watches than this. But normally we just carry it in our pocket. I don't do double duty like the Apple Watch.
CK: So not including your Cornell, what's your favorite Cornell watch? I guess, older Cornell watch, pocket Watch. And what's your favorite, just other watch in your collection?
JW: Okay, so for the pocket watches, I think I really... So this Paul Cornell took us years to find, not because it's the nicest, but because what it represents. These early American watch factories, they many times would inherit the machinery from another factory that had maybe gone out of business or sold. The Cornell Watch Company inherited equipment from the Newark Watch company.
And so there wasn't a supply chain to make new machinery. And in order to continue to innovate, these watch companies had to make the machinery in-house. So it's not like they're just making a watch. They have engineers trying to figure out how do we streamline these processes? How do we continue to innovate? And so to me, the Paul Cornell, which is 19 Jewel real rubies, stem winder, which was pretty unique at the time, it represents an investment in the company in a way that we may not see today. The company only existed six years, and they said, "We're going to create new machines, we're going to innovate." And this represents peak innovation. So I really like this watch for that reason.
I also like that it's a double sunk dial. There's no hairline cracks on it, which is crazy for how old it is. So it would definitely be that one. For non-Cornell, I would have to go with the Omega Seamaster that was gifted to me. When I went to college. Again, I felt like the watch was too big for me. Not in size, but in what it represented and what it costs. And it just seemed far too nice for me. And for four years I wore it and looked at it every day and it was like a companion.
CK: Which one is it?
JW: So I didn't bring it today, but it is black Wave Dial. It's a James Bond, but black Wave Down. And I think what's cool about it too is that my dad had the blue version, and so I'd always think about him, but I'd always think about, it was like what it represented with the James Bond movies and all that, it was a larger-than-Life type of timepiece. And I still have it today. My wife and I share it. It's actually on a rubber strap now. But yeah, I would say that's my favorite watch and I would never get rid of it.
CK: Yeah. It's hard when you have your own brand to wear anything else.
JW: Well, the thing is with the Cornell is that both my wife and I have really active lifestyles. And so we find that the Cornell gets a lot of nighttime wear, whereas during the day we're wearing Seikos, we've got some Rolex, the Omega, so we're a multiple watch a day type of family.
CK: Well, thank you very much for sharing your collection and the story of Cornell Watch Company.
JW: Absolutely.